The research is clear: The most valuable activity a team can do is collect user research on their design. Seeing the design through their users’ eyes will pinpoint areas of improvement, which will help with every business metric for the product or service.

Choosing that first user research project is critical. If you choose right, you’re the hero that changed the path of things forever. If you choose the wrong thing, then all that selling you’ve done is branded with being ineffectual (or worse, damaging).

In today’s UIEtips, we talk about the different techniques available for starting user research. I share what our favorites are and which ones we avoid.

Read the article, Starting Your User Research.

What techniques did you start your user research with? How did that work for getting people on board and inspired to create change? Leave us your thoughts below.

Recently, I’ve been talking about having your portfolio tell the story of your best work. One part of any story is the main character, who, in this case, would be you.

After all, a project is like an adventure. You start out heading in one direction, then things happen, and you end up growing your knowledge, your skills, and producing something that is brilliant.

It would be interesting to see how someone could create a portfolio that did a fantastic job of telling that adventure story.

What were the obstacles that you encountered? How did they force you to change your plans? What made them particularly gnarly? What piece of brilliance did you bring to the table to overcome them? What lessons did you learn in the process?

Who joined you on your adventure? How did you take advantage of their powers and special abilities? How did you compensate for their weaknesses? How did you resolve conflicts? How did you join forces to bring out something better than you could’ve if you had worked alone?

Where did you get surprised? What was it like to see your vision realized? What are your regrets? What are you particularly proud of?

Talking in terms of a main character that undergoes a change is a great way to approach a portfolio project description. It takes the focus away from the artwork and puts it on what you did to actually realize a design.

It nicely brings out what your special powers and talents are and shows how you compensate for your weaknesses. (After all, we all have weaknesses. Why not talk about them honestly and earnestly?)

Go ahead, tell your story. Show us what you can do.

After listening to my interview with UX Immersion speaker, Jeff Gothelf, Ziv posed this this question:

I was wondering about the viability of integrating this methodology into a design agency that basically ends it’s work with a recommendations document with no real access to the development teams. It sounds like major shifts in people’s understanding of the process are needed to accommodate that.

I sent the question off to Jeff, who supplied this awesome answer:

In an agency context, especially with existing clients, making Lean UX work requires the proper expectation setting up front. From the beginning of the engagement, even before the pitch, start setting the expectation with you client that this engagement will be different. There will be frequent check-ins, reviews, requests for access to customers and no clear, defined scope at the beginning of the engagement. Instead, establish a time box (a period of time for which the agency will be engaged) and agree on a problem statement the agency is being hired to solve. The other key thing to articulate and agree upon with your client is how you will measure success. What metrics will you use to determine that you’ve built the right solution to the problem statement? Once that is agreed upon, the iterative Lean UX process can begin. As you iterate note how your design hypotheses are measuring up against your goals.

At the end of the time box the client gets the best possible solution your team could come up with in that time frame. It will be a better solution than the one you would have scoped out in the traditional up-front heavy planning approach because you will be several iterations into it and have some level of validation to your designs.

What do you think?

A great portfolio is a collection of the stories that describe your best work.

As the demand for UX professionals increases, there’s been a renewed discussion on the importance of having a portfolio. There are even some, like Whitney Hess in a recent SxSW panel, who assert that because UX isn’t really about the deliverables, UX pros shouldn’t have a portfolio.

I think quite the opposite. I think that a UX portfolio is an important part of representing what we can do. It’s far more important than a résumé, which is usually just a history of our employment with a few bullets that talk about major accomplishments.

The résumé shows our journey, just like how a map of the world shows the path Magellan took to circumnavigate the globe. But that map doesn’t tell of Magellan’s skill in taking on challenges and overcoming obstacles. That’s what a great portfolio does.

Recently someone showed me some UX designer’s nicely-designed portfolio. It had a beautiful layout and highlighted several deliverables, such as wireframes, sketches, and personas. It even went so far as to explain what a wireframe was and how personas are helpful in the UX process, in case the hiring manager didn’t know those things.

However, what this nicely-designed portfolio failed to do was tell me about the designer’s accomplishments. He didn’t talk about the projects he created the wireframe for. He didn’t say how he developed the personas or how they were used. He didn’t talk about places where the project got complicated and he worked through it, producing an elegant outcome given the constraints.

These are things that smart hiring managers look for. They want to see what you do when faced with challenge, such as a short delivery time, a difficult co-worker, hardware constraints that reduce the design options, or all three at the same time. They want to see the thinking that got you from the idea through to the final design. They want to see what really tested your skills and experience in ways you’ve never been tested before, and how you produced something even you didn’t think you were capable of.

Go ahead. Build an awesome portfolio of your story. Talk about the accomplishments you’re most proud of and don’t leave out any detail that shows what you can do when the world decides to test you. That’s the portfolio of a great designer.

[To be fair to Whitney, she wrote a wonderful article that says all this and more for UX Matters. You should read it.]

Even the best of plans can go awry. We role play in our head how a usability test will proceed, understand the objectives at hand, and do a rigorous job of screening the participants. But what do you do when something totally unexpected occurs? Life circumstances among the participants can throw a curveball at our testing plan. What you do with the curveball can make all the difference in how you move forward with delivering your products and services.

In today’s UIEtips, we look back at an article from Steve Portigal. Steve takes a look at how some past participants took him outside of the business questions at hand, and how their life circumstances impacted his client’s business strategy. Each of the four cases Steve describes in the article made a profound affect on how he moved forward during the session and what his client came away with.

Read Steve’s article: What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It .

On April 17, Steve presents a UIE Virtual Seminar, Championing Contextual Research in Your Organization. He’ll describe the techniques, processes, and discussion points to make sure your design best fits the problem you’re trying to solve.

At this year’s SxSW conference, a panel with the Daily Show With Jon Stewart’s executive producer Rory Albanese revealed insight into a use for accessibility technology we’d never thought of.

If you go to enough discussions on accessibility, you’ll hear about this old chestnut: Cuts in the sidewalk curbs, put in for wheelchair access, is also used by people without disabilities, like folks with baby strollers and shopping carts. The idea being that accessibility aids add value to everyone’s experience, when designed well.

Well, in a panel about the secrets of comedy writing, Rory revealed one of the tricks they use for finding all those old pieces of footage that show politicians saying things they probably now regret. It turns out it’s an accessibility aid that’s come to the rescue.

The Daily Show’s staff takes advantage of a software application that searches the text from closed captioning of CSPAN and news programs to find keywords and phrases. The closed captioning, originally designed for the deaf and those with hearing issues, is now used by the staff’s team to provide us with some of the best comedy (and, frankly, investigative journalism) on television.

Who would’ve thought?

It sucks when an employee tells you how frustrating the new intranet system is that they went home crying and didnʼt want to come to work. The systems we build shouldnʼt becausing anxiety attacks in our co-workers.

Yet thatʼs exactly what happened in one company. As a result of a merger, they swapped in a new system for everyone to use. Customer service reps with 20 years of experience suddenly found themselves incapable of performing basic functions, frustrating the loyal customers they were trying to serve. What was once a routine order change now needed a call to an understaffed help desk with huge hold times. Nobody was happy.

It was clear to see from this company that a simple focus on user experience could bring great benefit. Identifying simple improvements in the new system could smooth many of the issues, which translated immediately into improved customer service and better business results.

In todayʼs UIEtips, I share four tricks weʼve found work well when looking to improve the user experience of intranets and internal systems. These tricks create a quick list of fixes that reflect nicely on an organizationʼs bottom line. If you do any work on your companyʼs intranet (and you should be), this is a great place to start.

Read today’s article: 4 Tricks To Quick Intranet UX Improvements

While weʼre talking about internal systems, you donʼt want to miss James Robertsonʼs full-day UX Immersion workshop on integrating mobile into your organizationʼs intranet. James has a ton of great examples and a solid workflow on identifying where mobile can boost your intranetʼs effectiveness. Join him on April 25 in Portland, OR. Learn more about James’ workshop.

It’s not uncommon for people to multi-task between 2-3 devices during their day. A person
may have their laptop out accessing the company intranet, while using their tablet for
research, and finally checking their smart phone for their email. And it’s rare for a
person to use one device for just one activity. Most of the time a user is jumping between
different applications and sites on multiple devices. This makes designing applications
and web sites a challenge. How is the user accessing and using this information and on
what device?

In today’s tips, Luke Wroblewski shares two techniques to make the process of designing
web applications and sites for multiple devices more manageable: classifying device
experiences and designing/building responsively. I’m sure you’ll find Luke’s article quite
useful.

Read today’s article: Device Experiences & Responsive Design.

We’re very excited to have Luke as part of our UX Immersion Conference in Portland, OR,
April 23-25. Luke’s full day workshop, A Detailed Look at Designing Mobile Inputs, will
help you design intuitive mobile forms that help guide your users to put the right data in
quickly. Learn more about his workshop.

Try out an idea. See how it works. That’s the basics of an iteration, which we’ve used in our user experience work since the beginning.

On the surface, it feels like when a team moves to an Agile development method, they are also moving to an iterative process. After all, what is a series of sprints but iterations on the design.

In today’s UIEtips, I look at what happens when we try to iterate in an Agile process and, with the help of InContext’s Hugh Beyer, why that doesn’t always work the way we’d hope. Then I look at two approaches that lower the costs of iteration and make them more desirable for Agile teams. If you’re working in Agile, you’ll want to read this one closely.

Read today’s article: Cost Effective Approaches to Iteration in Agile UX.

By the way, I’m the biggest Hugh Beyer fan on the planet. I’m thrilled that he’s doing a full-day workshop for us at this April’s UX Immersion conference in Portland. It’s been a blast working with him on the session, and I know it’s going to be great. Peruse the outline and sign up quickly – space is limited and it’s filling up.

We’re seeing that the move to designing for mobile can be a real challenge for many UX Professionals. Once they get past the initial thinking that it’s just another screen size, they are hit with all the different dimensions of what it takes to create a great mobile experience. That can seem overwhelming at first.

Some of those challenges come up pretty fast. Often, the first one a UX Pro encounters is the realization that you can’t just shrink down the desktop experience and expect it to work. Mobile brings out a need to curate the experience in a way that we didn’t need to do with our desktop interfaces. (It turns out that those desktop interfaces truly could use some curation, but all those pixels let us get away without doing it.)

Another challenge is realizing that what you do away from your desktop machine changes how you think about the problem. Looking up a restaurant’s location at a desktop machine is very different than looking it up in a mobile context, such as in a cab while on the phone trying to give directions to someone who is lost on their way there. Looking up a product description and reviews on an e-commerce site is different when you’re in the store, standing in front of a competitor’s product. Identifying these mobile contexts and designing for them can provide a challenge that stretches even the saviest UX Pro’s skills.

Then, once the UX Pro gets into the design cycles, another challenge is figuring out if they’ve come up with a natural interface in a world with touch, accelerometers, cameras, and location aware devices. It’s easy to get sucked into the trap of focusing on the hardware instead of thinking of the user’s experience.

There are ways to navigate all these challenges (and the others that mobile design presents). A solid understanding of the principles of mobile design and a process that helps with quick iterations, including fast and simple prototyping techniques, gets the UX Pro a rocket boost in the right direction.

We’ve seen this in Rachel Hinman’s work. When she was at Adaptive Path, and now in her work at Nokia, she was one of the first to talk about these challenges and how to navigate them. She was one of the first people we reached out to when we were putting together our UX Immersion program, and was tickled when she said she would put together a full-day workshop to help UX Pros get that necessary boost.

If you’re moving your UX work to include mobile design, you owe it to yourself to look closely at Rachel’s full-day workshop. It’ll provide just what you need to take on the challenges you’re facing.

Rachel Hinman has packed a ton of mobile design awesomeness into her full-day workshop, Mobile UX: From Principles to Prototypes, at the UX Immersion conference in Portland on April 23.