Benchmark

Benchmark is, in a nutshell, research to know what are other companies like yours (hence, your market) proposing as a specific solution to a certain demand. Each product is made of concepts and characteristics that, in a world of 7 billion human beings, are likely to have been tested and reproduced repeatedly out there. It isn’t thus the process that will make your product look and behave similarly to others, but on the contrary, is making sure that you know everything that’s been tried out there (or at least the significant parcel) so that your solution may be proposing something that goes beyond what’s been proposed so far. In Servistos, for instance, a thorough study was conducted on similar products’ interfaces, in order to understand the patterns of features begin proposed out there. The same for InRhythm’s rebranding proposal, with the colors on brands of similar companies being isolated and compared.

Desk Research

Desk Research encompasses all research that is conducted indoors and without the need of another human counterpart - be it with books, articles, newspapers or anything that can add an extra layer of either qualitative and/ or quantitative data to the project's conceptual basis. I was able to use it differently across several projects. At Servistos, John Thackara's “In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World" was combined with different articles on the favela's socioeconomics and statistics regarding the community's access to computers and gadgets. At SOMA, some of Freud's articles were used to define boundaries on the concept of Somatization. I make it clearly distinct from benchmark research as the latter looks for other attempted solutions towards a certain problem, while the former looks to define the problem itself.

Field Research

Field Research might be taken as a broad term to define all research that is conducted outside an office/ studio/ lab. Here though, I’m restraining it to the scope of early recognition of a certain context and participant observation, which unlike interviews, aim at not distinguishing the researcher as such, so to keeping subjects as unbiased as possible. This kind of research was often used at Servistos, when first going to specific places in the favela that would allow me to understand the place’s most popular means of “internal” communication at the spot.

Interviews

Interviews are probably the quickest way to obtain specialized information on a certain subject. Straight to the point questions, usually made with a “specialist” - or someone who might know a lot about a certain subject. A slightly less obvious utility for it is to create bonds with the interviewees by directly requiring their opinion. The sense of empowerment generated by it might create allies that will be willing to help the project in the future, even in other situations that might require more active engagement, such as tests and focus groups. It has been widely used in Servistos, specially to get in touch with community's leaders and part of the population there. Also in Diboo, interviews were conducted with parents, psychologists, educators and of course, the kids themselves. At InRhythm, interviews were held during meetings with other members of the company directly related to a certain object being produced (e.g. Agile Consultants for creating a Scrum Diagram). This would concentrate most of the possible questions in a single event and optimize the entire creative process.

Focus Groups

Focus Groups are a great way to either get easy impressions from a certain group over a product, situation, or even to test something. The group bias must be taken in consideration though, as people will instinctively change their opinions when among others. With that in mind, putting together individuals who might already know each other might as well both relax and stimulate them, in a way it wouldn’t happen otherwise. In Diboo for instance, kids were often asked questions accompanied by their parents, siblings or a group of friends, in order to get the necessary confidence to talk to an interviewer which is a complete stranger. The location also matters, as many subjects will feel much more at ease talking at their natural environment. Also at Servistos, many group dynamics were held at the local resident’s association, with a group of people who already knew each other.

Mind Maps + Brainstorms

Mind Maps are useful both as an individual as well as a group tool. They allow graphic envisioning of a sequence of ideas and the creation of numerous other connections through them, specially due to its lack of linearity. Particularly on a group situation, the combination of that with a Brainstorming session becomes almost a natural impulse, as the mere envisioning of those ideas stimulates other participants to verbalize their thoughts, which brings about other ideas and so on. Almost all my projects went through this process at one point, with specially fruitful outcomes on Diboo, Júlia and Servistos - all of which involved a large and multidisciplinary group of participants.

Conceptual Sketches

A Conceptual Sketch is the first stop of an idea that meets its graphic form. It has no boundaries, as its main objective must be to reflect the raw thought back to its creator. In the context of the creation of a site/ app, it often comes already in the form of a (really) unpolished Wireframe, keeping little or no fidelity at all with what a finished and fully usable product should look like. Its presentability depends mainly on who’s looking at it: other designers or people used to deal with designers might be able to debate over a very simplified mockup, whereas people who aren’t might need a more finished product in order to visualize the idea. In SOMA for instance, the initial stakeholders were a group of designers, therefore just raw drawings were about enough to get things moving. At InRhythm though, most times the prototypes need to be slightly polished before reaching a higher level within the organization. Same thing for Servistos, which was often presented to people with no connection at all to designers.

Wireframes

A Wireframe is one the most important artifacts generated during the creation of an interface. Its a representation of the interface's structure - an easy analogy to the skeleton underneath the skin. Programs like Balsamiq can make the creation of a wireframe absurdly simple, although it can be assembled at any other program and even hand-drawn - see “Conceptual Sketches” right above. Just like a sketch, its supposed to be a clearly unfinished mockup that will be used as a tool for debating the interface’s structure, as well as its main interactions. The level of finishing is variable, although it might follow a simple rule of thumb: It should be polished enough to make the ideas behind it clear and unpolished enough to ensure general understanding that no - or little - visual design is being debated at that point. Pretty much every interface I ever generated went through a Wireframe at some point - see Servistos, SOMA, InRhythm’s website, Diboo.

Card Sorts

An efficient way to create categories, terminologies and groups of content that are intuitive to the end user. Card Sorts usually involve generating cards with different units of content and asking someone to organize them for you. In open card sorts, participants will organize the cards in the way that makes most sense to them, whereas in closed card sorts, they must do so using pre-determined groups. It was used extensively on the Guggenheim’s website redesign. Being it a platform that holds a huge amount of information divided in an equally huge amount of groups, it was necessary to find out which of those groups were more relevant to end users and which didn’t even make sense. Over the course of a month, multiple card sorts were held among museum visitors, tourists, staff and NYC inhabitants in general, with the results being compared in the end.

Site Maps

Mapping a website in the form of a flowchart is likely one of the best ways to have an overview of it, as a system. Its useful at anytime in a project, although at least as a good practice it can be used from the very beginning of a product’s life and updated as the product evolves. A good site map moves in one clear direction and conveys relations between objects intuitively. Almost all of my projects involved one - see Servistos, SOMA, InRhythm’s website, Diboo.

High Fidelity Graphic Mockups

Just like Wireframes, these are a certain appearance within almost any project. Once the page's structure is agreed upon through other artifacts such as low fidelity mockups and wireframes, a graphical version of what will be built subsequently is generated. Although it still doesn't contain the actual interactions that will be present in the functional product, the graphical mockup looks just like it, and is when most of the visual design is assembled and iterated upon. Its main function is to ensure that the visuals are coherent and well balanced. Discussions upon it might be really short if a well stablished brand manual is used as reference. Cases like branding from scratch, such as Diboo or almost complete rebranding such as InRhythm, though, had to go through a good number of iterations over these pieces until an agreed upon version was reached.

Interactive Mockups

Interactive prototypes aren't necessarily high fidelity - such as the case with paper prototypes and interactive Balsamiq mockups. The moment of its appearance in a certain project will depend on things such as the degree of innovation involved in a desired interaction or in how much the entire product might depend on that one interaction to even exist. More often, though, it is among one of the product's final stages as it requires a significantly bigger amount of time to be built, when compared to other mockups. And sometimes its not even used at all, with the graphical mockup being turned straight into code. Programs like InVision, Powerpoint and Fireworks might offer quick ways to build those out of purely graphical mockups - they were used in projects like Servistos, SOMA and part of InRhythm's website.

Usability Tests

To give a certain task for a user to accomplish in a certain system, and then observe his behavior as he goes through it. Notably though, this test must take in consideration the user’s context and characteristics as these will shape entirely the way he reacts to the product. It was a vital practice for products like Servistos, which had a largely heterogeneous audience and included people that weren’t necessarily accustomed to using digital devices. Also Diboo, in which the main audience is composed by children - who have a significantly different perspective of a computer when compared to adults.