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5 Critique Questions for Designers and Clients

September 26/2011 Michael Carvin

critique ux

A few months ago, I was asked “How do we take our design reviews and make them less about the User Interface specifics and more about the quality of the experience?” After seeing Adam Connor and Aaron Irrizary put on a fantastic presentation at the 2011 IA Summit, I decided to revisit this thought.

I’ve had good success with other designers, team members and stakeholders incorporating Morville’s updated UX honeycomb:

• Usable
• Useful
• Desirable
• Findable
• Accessible
• Credible (though I’ve seen some use Trustworthy here)
• Value

Depending on the context of the project, the state of the design (storyboard vs. prototype), people in the review session, and who’s presenting and/or leading the discussion, I’ll ask (or present with):

What’s the real-world story of this {microsite | website | application | process | thing}?
Everything we do for a client’s project or program of projects should be for a reason. Of course, the reasons will vary project to project. In my current project, our client is reacting to both customer requests for enhanced web self-service and increasingly costly service and support calls, which is a nice lead-in to…

What’s the business impact?
Is there a demonstrated downward trend in online-to-offline conversions?

Who’s going to interact with this?
As designers and clients, we need to have a better idea of our target audience beyond the generic “everyone” or “Rachael Ray moms,” or some such. Being able to break your audience down by demographics or business metrics will make the design of your product or service that much more meaningful in the end. And if you can’t do that breakdown, commission a solid but timely and cost-effective market research plan.

How are those folks getting here? Overall, is this consistent with the brand and related touchpoints?
Sometimes, inbound paths are very well-defined – an intranet page, or a link in an email or PDF. Other times, there are multiple online and offline channels driving traffic to your site or application. As teammates on a project, designers and clients enjoy a fantastic opportunity to get a lay of the land in terms what people are seeing and hearing each step of the way. We all want to avoid seeing a prospect or customer losing trust or bailing out because of receiving the wrong message at the wrong time.

Are we following up on the expectations set on the pages (or other touchpoints as appropriate) leading into this?  Are we presenting a seamless story in the visual and verbal sense?
While design by committee is never favored in this industry, it is vital and necessary to make sure we hit client expectations and meet not only their goals but their need to succeed. Through validation, stakeholder meetings, and everyday communications we are able to filter the wants and needs, prioritize, and discover what has to actually be done. While design is subjective, these techniques provide us with the tools to measure efficiency, improved usability, and increased success based on measuring cost per action to access larger audiences and allow all skill levels to interact without being affected by our designs.

I ask these questions to establish a baseline of the designer’s understanding of the problem intended to be addressed by their design. If their foundation is weak, the house designed won’t be as stable nor will it feel as “homey” as it could. Questions about why certain User Interface elements were designed in a certain way are either preemptively addressed through the baseline questions or easily talked through afterwards or in a subsequent session.

What I’ve found about this approach is that it addresses the overall experience, usually without getting into granular User Interface elements. In the mixed sessions I’ve run, where stakeholders and team members are involved, the feedback has been positive. Businesspeople saw our level of understanding of their problems, and gained a better appreciation for the user side of the equation. The team’s efforts were validated or clarified, and depending on who was in the room from our teams, the business challenges were better appreciated.