First post of 2019! And it’s about a new project which I have until February to complete – writing a 3,000 word report on how UX helps businesses to achieve their goals – essentially evaluating successful user-centred design. This essay is part of a new unit called ‘Applied User Research’ and forms a core part of Year 2 of BSc User Experience Design at NUA.

The report needs to utilise around 5 case studies to use as examples of how the UX process has meant that these case study products are successful and meet business, as well as user needs.

Initial thoughts

My initial thoughts and ideas were to leverage my industry contacts at companies such as Earthware (where I completed an internship in the summer of 2018) and The User Story (where I am currently working part-time) and ask them if they could provide me with some examples of cases where they’ve felt that user-centred design has resulted in a product that successfully meets measurable business objectives – measurable being the key word.

Browsing the websites of a lot of UX agencies, they talk a lot about what the challenge was and give the steps they took to build a solution, but not all of them give measurable indications as to how their solution actually helped, for example not all of them give statistics likes sales figures or revenue increases or usage increases or similar to show how their solution helped and how it helped the customer to reach their desired business objective.

So, the first step was to find some case studies from UX agencies and software houses that had measurable outcomes. This search rendered a list of around 10 suitable case studies after a day or two of searching.

The second step was find some case studies that could be ‘verified’ by the customer or a third party. This was a lot harder since websites don’t often tend to get reviewed, so the best thing to do was find some case studies that focus on products used by a large amount of people and use thoughts and feelings surrounding those products as the ‘verification’. Focusing on large-scale projects for famous organisations was another good option since they tend to publish a page on their website notifying users that the site has been updated and on these pages also tend to list changes that have been made and sometimes even include a quote from a director or project manager about the new site. A lot of UX agencies try to include these in their case studies if they can, but it’s good to find similar quotes elsewhere about the work just to back up the validity.

Progress so far

I found it a good idea to focus on point-of-service systems (like automated ticket machines) and web apps (like journey planners) which are used by a lot of people and user reviews and thoughts can be found easily. These types of products also tend to have measurable metrics such as usage and sales increases. When focusing on websites I found it a good idea to focus on projects which had very specific goals, for example increasing the amount of donations sent via the website or improving the information architecture to make finding information easier (and even re-writing content so that it was easier to understand!) or increasing user engagements. These all have very measurable outcomes whereas whole-site redesigns tend not to – case studies that focus on whole-site redesigns tend to be very broad and just say ‘it looks better’ (or similar).

As of January 6th 2019, I still have over a month to finish this piece and have found 4 of the 5 required case studies. I’ve written drafts of each of the 4 case studies and so far this totals just over 1,000 words which leaves 2,000 to go. There still needs to be another case study in there which will add a minimum of 400 or 500 words, leaving approximately 1,500 words to go and half of the report written. Each of the 4 existing case studies could be written in a little more depth and more third-party verification could be found for each.

The project brief also states that the report should include details about the company policies, beliefs and how they differ from their competitors. Since each of my case studies are from different companies and for different companies, this should be fairly easy to write and consume the remaining word count.

Ideal finish date

The report is due on February 15th 2019.

It takes me approximately 2-3 hours to fully research a case study and an additional hour to write about it. With one case study remaining, I hope to have this completed by the end of the week, which is January 11th. This may seem like a long time but university is beginning again and this new unit also includes a live brief project with a real client which will also be time-consuming.

I’d like to have the report fully written by the end of January which leaves a week or two in February to check it and make any adjustments and minor improvements.