User Experience Health Check
A measure a day keeps the redesign away
A measure a day keeps the redesign away
Livia Labate & Austin Govella | IA Summit 2009, Memphis, TN

Presentation Agenda
g
What is the UX Health Check
The origins of the approach
When to apply this method
How it evolved over the years
How to conduct a UX Health Check
Who needs to be involved
How to report the assessment
How to compare over time
How to sell the idea

What we’ll really talk about today
y y

Where did this come from?
The Health Check was created to help product
management communicate progress and
improvements to executives.
• Th
There was immense pressure from upper management to show
i f tt h
progress on a specific product line (new capital investment).
• General manager wanted a report she could give our president
g p g p
every 30 days that showed how we “moved the dial”
• By numerically rating our progress on each aspect of the service
once a month, we could report whether or not and how much
once a month we could report whether or not and how much
we “moved the dial”.

User Experience Health Check
A method to quantify the
qualitative user experience
5

Why do it:
Wh d it • Applicable to any
(specially the last bullet!) product or service
• Measures detailed feature
sets or very generalized
e o e y ge e a ed
notions of service.
•IIntroduces a shared
d h d
language for teams to
discuss elements of an
di l f
experience.
6

How do you do it?
1. Deconstruct the service
(list capabilities and chunk logical groups)
(list capabilities and chunk logical groups)
2. Choose competitive benchmarks
(similar solutions that can be compared)
(similar solutions that can be compared)
3. Establish scoring criteria
(set t e e e e t a easu g sca e)
(set the referential measuring scale)
4. Set target scores
5. Set current score based on existing state
Set current score based on existing state
6. Tally up and communicate
7. Rinse and repeat (periodically)!
7 Rinse and repeat (periodically)!

It all starts with a project
p j
For Example:
p
• You’re planning a conference
(like the 2010 IA Summit!)
• You’re building a website
(to inform, communicate & publicize)
( i f i & bli i )
• You have a list of things you want to do
You have a list of things you want to do
8

Step 1: Deconstruct the Service
Break down the parts of the product or service
to a level they can be looked at in isolation and
still be comparable to examples elsewhere.
• By product or services in a(n eco)system
By product or services in a(n eco)system
• By user’s Mental Model spaces
• By generic/universal mental models
(consumption and service lifecycles)

Exercise:
Generate a list of capabilities
This is when we asked the audience to help
us by shouting out things that make up the
“IA Summit”; the items we should consider
when deconstructing the whole experience
of attending the event.

Exercise:
Chunk capabilities into groups
We then had some volunteers come up to the
front of the room and cluster the capabilities
identified (we wrote then down into post‐it
notes) creating chunks of like items to easily
roll‐up parts of the UX Health Check.

Step 2: Choose Competitive Benchmarks
Identify similar solutions (products and services)
that have similar capabilities to the ones
identified for comparison.
• For each capability answer the question:
For each capability answer the question:
“Who does this well?”
• Select at least one for each capability; you can add
Select at least one for each capability; you can add
multiple benchmarks for each if relevant.
• The benchmark product or services don’t need to be in
the same industry or serve the same purpose as the
capability you are comparing to.

Exercise:
Choose Competitive Benchmarks
We briefly went through some of the
capabilities and for each one, asked the
audience to identify a few relevant
benchmarks. For example: “Event
registration” yield evite.com, not‐IXDA, etc.

Step 3: Establish the Scoring Criteria
Score Rating Considerations
< 30 Problem Area
Doesn’t meet core user needs or
usability standards: It’s broken!
30 >
30 Meets basic user needs; isn’t broken;
M t b i d i ’t b k
Functional the bare minimum
50 > Parity with Meets user expectations across
Benchmarks comparable capabilities
70 > Very Good Better than several benchmarks
80 > Better Than Most
Exceeds the main competitors, almost
as good as the market leader
90 > Best In Class Market differentiator

Step 4: Set Target Scores
Go through each capability and ask the question
“How good do we need to be at this to meet our
business goals and user expectations?
expectations?”
• Involve core team of people actively making decisions
Involve core team of people actively making decisions
about the user experience of the service you are
assessing.
• Get agreement on the targets through conversation.
Everyone is empowered to disagree and defend their
perspective; use insights from existing research and
i i i h f i i h d
competitive analysis to fuel and support arguments.

Exercise:
Set target scores
The audience contributed what they thought
were the right targets for the IA Summit in
various capabilities based on the scoring criteria
we reviewed. Through discussion we agreed on
targets that were originally divergent.

Step 5: Evaluate and Score Current
Review current solution and ask “Compared to
Compared
our targets and where we want to be, how good
are we today?”
today?
• Get agreement on the final score through conversation
Get agreement on the final score through conversation.
• Everyone is empowered to disagree and defend their
perspective
• Everyone should be versed in existing information to
help decision‐ making (usability evaluations, user
feedback, etc)

Exercise:
Evaluate and score
The audience contributed with their opinion of
where certain capabilities were today (during
the IA Summit this was being presented). The
intermittent Wi‐Fi Internet access did not get a
g
good score on the spreadsheet!

Step 5: Tally up and communicate
Step 5: Tally up and communicate
This page intentionally left blank.
The point of this slide was to show that the final
artifact is not the point of conducting a UX Health
Check. What it looks like is not very relevant, but
what you communicate and learn through this
process that expresses the real value of the work.

Example
Communicate the baseline experience

Example
Problem areas that need love

Example
Gaps where the UX doesn’t meet the vision

Example
Chart UX progress over time

Example
Map UX evolution to business metrics

A few good reasons to give it a try!
g g y
• To help answer “How well does this service meet
user needs, expectations and motivations?” (i
d t ti d ti ti ?” (in
terms all tribes can understand).
• To provide a snapshot of the experience at a point
d h f h
in time AND track its evolution over time.
• To identify which are the biggest problems and
opportunities areas to influence future work
prioritization and product direction.
prioritization and product direction
• To serve as a concrete artifact portraying how
your work is directly affecting the service evolution.
k i di l ff i h i l i
26

What we covered today
y

Ask questions, find out more and let us
know if we can help you get started at
http://uxhealthcheck.com
@austingovella on Twitter
http://ThinkingAndMaking.com
p g g
@livlab on Twitter
http://livlab.com/thinkia