It’s interesting, I write research questions daily but there’s always room for improvement.

In a recent blog post, Survey Monkey survey, Tangler disussion forum, LinkedIn Question and Yahoo Question I asked - ‘Would you see a psychologist online?’

Silly me, the question is too Personal and Closed!

Among lots of great responses, I’ve had a few useless ‘No’ responses. Some people even said that they’d prefer not to answer. And that’s my fault, I asked the question the wrong way. So, I’ve changed the question!

‘What do you think about online counselling?’

This is an open question that uses simple and non-confronting language.  Of course, now I’m getting lots of very constructive, lengthy and open responses!

If you are writing on public forums, make sure you consider how someone will feel about others seeing their responses and keep the questions open if you want to start a long conversation.

In a new software design project that I’m working on, I’m simply not allowed to observe the current human interactions as they occur offline.

The context we are working in is a bit foreign to me and actual observation would be invaluable. My client had a brilliant idea – role play!

So today we got into it! I felt like I was back at Lifeline learning how to do phone counselling - role play, after role play after role play before I was allowed near the phones!

I played the role of the end-user and my client the service provider. It was amazing the ideas we came up with in 20 minutes!  By empathising with the end-user I could instantly see things that would improve the interaction online.

The exciting thing was that some of the functionality that we came up with doesn’t even exist now! Completely new tools that are only useful online! Amazing!

A couple of colleagues were watching us and said they couldn’t believe all the ideas they had too! I could see their pens smoking as they wrote notes!

It turns out that the role-play process we fell into today through sheer desperation has been addressed by usability practitioners before.

Jared Spool states,

    ‘Role playing is a time-tested psychological technique to put people into a more conducive context to gain the information you need.’

He used it to get research participants into the right frame of mind.  However, today we found that it was an incredibly useful technique for designers to objectify the online interaction and identify better ways of doing things. It allowed us to interrogate the context of usage and simultaneously envision how the online environment can be leveraged to make the service outcome possibly better than face-to-face! Time will tell on that one!

Spool also suggests in this persona article, that we could have initiated role-playing with Personas. We didn’t formally adopt personas today (they are not ready yet) but my role was discussed before I launched into it.

Gry Seland wrote a great research paper on Role play as a design method. He suggests role-play has the following uses:

   1. making end users active participants in the development process,
   2. creating a focus on user needs,
   3. fast idea creation in early phases of a project, and
   4. enhancing the developers’ understanding of the future context-of-use.

Lots of links to academic articles can be found on a old IxDA Feb 2008 discussion about interaction design and theatre. It suggests that ‘participatory design can involve role playing to understand task flows and the needs of users and also to envision how a future design might affect the overall practices’.

Why don’t you try out this research method in your next project, particularly if you are short on time or money and can’t access your users directly. Hey, I’m sure you did role plays as a kid? You never know, you might have fun!

I am always looking for better ways to communicate UX requirements to designers and developers.

I have had some discussions with developers about the best way to specify Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).  Some say ‘just prototype it’, others say ‘workshop it’ and more reckon ‘you should document it in detail.’ But how?

On UX Matters Richard Cecil claims ‘documenting the design of any page that uses Ajax (RIA) is a challenge, because the page—and, more importantly, components on the page—can have different states.’

Richard describes how to document RIAs using modified workflows that include an indication of asynchronous and synchronous events combined with wireframes that include interface components in their various states. Actually, he calls them ‘Wireflows’.  That is, the workflow includes elements of the wireframe in it, indicating the state of the page.  I believe it is very important to include the state information on the same diagram as the workflow, not on a separate state diagram.  If they are separate then it simply makes it harder to interpret.

It was interesting to note in the comments to his post that a couple of people said Axure is the right tool right for this job.  We have used it and found the dynamic panels help to clearly capture complex information about page interactions.

Do you think Axure is the answer? Have you used it to communicate?