Business: Stakeholders

Planning is one of the most important steps when you’re going to do usability testing, concept testing, or any type of UX research. Collectively planning a UX study with your stakeholders helps align teams on what you need to learn from users. Conducting a planning workshop lets your team members contribute to your research studies, allowing you to capitalize on their various perspectives.

In this article, I’ll briefly highlight some goals for collectively creating a UX research study plan and having stakeholders contribute to your study guide. Then I’ll outline the main parts of a study guide and describe the importance of each section. Finally, I’ll consider the importance of creating a protocol for UX-research sessions. Read More

In this edition of Ask UXmatters, our panel of UX experts discusses several ways of involving stakeholders at different stages of a project.

What are the best ways to involve stakeholders in the research and design for a project—especially when you have a large number of them? Do you bring all of them into an initial design meeting? Or wait until you have a solid first design? Or should you wait to involve stakeholders until you have a very strong, well-iterated design? How should you best handle the different types of stakeholders—for example, those who will actually use the product versus those who would decide to buy the product? Read More

“To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.”—Milton Glaser

User experience and its associated fields of expertise—such as usability, information architecture, interaction design, and user interface design—have expanded rapidly over the past decade to accommodate what seems like insatiable demand, as the world moves toward an increasingly digital existence.

As UX professionals, we often take technology for granted, accepting the massive complexity and rapid change in our field as the norm—and perhaps even something to embrace and enjoy. With this outlook and because we’re steeped in our daily professional activities, it becomes all too easy for us to forget that ours is not the usual point of view, and the technological change we expect, the expert jargon we speak, and the processes we use are foreign and confusing to other people. So, while we focus our attention on the users of digital products, we can sometimes be remiss in our treatment of another important audience—the stakeholders and clients with whom we collaborate to complete our assignments and projects. Read More