MUX - Card Sorting, User Personas, Storyboarding, Prototyping

Discover

Field studies, user interviews, identifying stakeholders

Explore

Card sorting, personas, user journeys, storyboarding

Design

Prototyping

Testing and Reiterate

Wizard of Oz’ing, A/B Testing

User Persona

A semi-fictional profile of your target user built from real-world data and insight

Group users with similar characteristics into few distinct categories

• Solo freelancers

• In-house design teams

• Agency teams

These users may rely on your product, but their NEEDS and HABITS may look different

Write a short bio for each ____________ to help your team empathize with users and anticipate needs and behaviors

Goal-Directed Persona

Ideal when you’re focusing on your user’s main intent. These personas highlight what users are trying to achieve and the obstacles they face along the way.

Example: For a freelance designer persona, the goal might be finding a tool that keeps client feedback in one place.

Role-Based Persona

That person could be a small business owner or the head of marketing for a large corporation. These personas emphasize the responsibilities, decision-making power, and tasks related to their position.

Example: A design director persona might highlight budget ownership and cross-team influence

Card Sorting

Quick and easy way to spark conversation about what matters most to a user

By putting a deck of cards, each with a word or single image and then asking to rank them in order of preference

Goals are to reveal how items are grouped together, understand users’ mental models, generate new ideas and validate current ones, and identify gaps in content

Open Card Sorting

Participants organize cards into as many groups as they want and assign their own labels to the groups

Closed Card Sorting

Participants are given both cards and category labels and group the cards to the categories that make sense to them

Case Study: Mattel

Mattel noticed decline in visits to Doll Showcase section (over 2,000 dolls and accessories) in Barbie collector’s website

Website was no longer resonating with collectors’ perspectives and navigation preferences

Already-existing format was based on marketing-based themes with multiple collections and series

Did both closed- and open- card sorting with 130 cards, 9 participants (both new to Barbies and dedicated Barbie collectors)

Finding: Each collector has personalized preference

New website: Allows users to search by doll name, year of release, identity number, collector labels, and past themes

New design: Allows personalized browsing experience

Storyboarding

Storyboard tells a story through images in a sequence of panels that chronologically maps the story’s main events
Identify a scenario so a viewer can understand what’s going on

Explain user’s actions, environment, emotional state, media interface, etc.

Journey Map

Visualization of the process a user goes through to achieve a goal, more textual, focuses more on the different steps of the journey

Low-fidelity prototyping

Doesn’t have to be interactive or functional (hand-drawn, Balsamiq, Sketch)

High-fidelity prototyping

Interactive, pressable elements, flow between pages (Figma)