A User Research and UX Design Starter Kit
Today I want to share with you my User Research and UX Design Starter Kit. It a 48 pages .PDF that contains my user interview cheat-sheet, my templates for product / service concept, my user journey map templates, my user flow kit, some mobile, tablet
and desktop templates for paper prototyping and my guerrilla usability testing checklist. I created this kit because I re-use a lot those templates and resources across all my projects. So I like having them all in one single place. I also use this kit to
facilitate workshops and teaching classes. I mostly used to print those for in-person workshops but now I send them to the participants / students so that they can either print at home or use this online. You can get the kit directly from my shop.
A User Interview Cheatsheet
A few months ago I decided to put together a list of user interview and follow up questions that help me build my user interview scripts and usability test protocols. Interviewing people without biasing them and asking open questions is hard. This
list helps me a lot so it’s now included in the kit.
You can find the list as a stand-alone article here, with more resources and books if you want to dig further into user interviews.
A Product / Service Concept template
This template will help your teams define and summarise a clear product or
service definition. This helps a lot when you want to align a whole team (but also stakeholder) and go in the same direction. It can also be used as a reminder, later in the project, for were the project was supposed to go (especially if the project
shifted already a few times).
I also really like Dan Mall’s “only-ness” statement that concentrates on what makes your product or service unique compared to competition.
A User Journey Map canvas
The experience of your users doesn’t start with your product. A User Journey Map lets you map the whole experience within your product/service but also before and after to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
For more information about how to create user journey maps you can take a look at my article An Introduction to User Journey Map + PDF Template. If
you are more of an online person (especially at the moment) take a look at my Miro Board User Journey Map Template.
I also wrote a 5 chapters ebook on User Journey Mapping
- An Ebook on available on Amazon, Google Play and Kobo
- You can read the first chapter on Sitepoint
- Online ebook available with a Sitepoint membership
A User Flow kit
The kit contains different types of arrows and some geometric shapes to let you
created a user flow. I usually use squares for “pages/views”, diamonds for actions and bubbles for user decisions (or sometimes small interactions that trigger modals on the same page). Those are great for paper group exercise. When working remotely,
I usually use some miro boards for that.
Printable mobile, tablet and desktop templates
The kit contains different paper prototype templates for mobile, tablet and desktop, with or without notes. Each template has some little dots to help you draw your quick prototypes.
A Guerrilla Usability Testing checklist
Last but not least, the kit contains a big checklist to help you with guerrilla usability testing (face to face, in your office or remote). This goes through the different steps of a test, from “Preparing the test” to “Before the test”, “During the
test”, “End of the test” to “Synthesis and findings”.
Get the Kit
The kit was revamped for 2023 with new content, some PDF and docx format to help you save more time when building interview guides and conducting usability testing sessions. You can now get it on my brand new shop.
