Universal Principles of UX

40

Gather requirements.

Besides reading through any existing documentation (see Principle 56), we start each project by interviewing business stakeholders and potential end-users. During these interviews, which are about thirty minutes each, we ask open-ended questions to encourage interviewees to share their thoughts in greater detail.

These semistructured, qualitative interviews are a tool borrowed from social sciences, and they’re designed to be open enough so topics can be explored that we wouldn’t have been able to imagine beforehand. Our client contact helps figure out who to talk to within their organization, and together we select from their current customers. The goal is to obtain knowledge from the business stakeholders while better ...