quickux | The Product Guy

I started writing about Quick-UX in 2008. Since then, I have written many detailed articles exploring, evaluating, and identifying areas of improvement for real products — along the components that make up Quick-UX. Now, through the help of Google Docs, as I did the other week with the release of the Quick-MI Worksheet, I’m sharing the Quick-UX Worksheet to make it even easier and faster for you to apply Quick-UX to your products, track progress, and share the results with your team. The Quick-UX Worksheet automatically performs all the necessary calculations and summarizes the product’s Usability, Usefulness, and Desirability for you.

About Quick-UX

Quick-UX evaluates the degree to which a product successfully addresses the following 3 questions:

Can I use it? (Usability)
Should I use it? (Usefulness)
Do I want to use it? (Desirability)

The elements evaluated in response to each question constitute a minimal representative subset that accurately addresses the question posed while adhering to the goals of Quick-UX.

Often, a quick assessment of User eXperience is more aptly called for. A quick assessment allows for rapid compilation of simple heuristics that can be very handy in providing…

a summarized view of a product’s overall User eXperience,
directional guidance for a product’s future development, and/or
metrics for comparison with other products.

Quick-UX is a method that I have developed and refined over time and frequently utilize when quick assessments are best suited to the task. The method that I describe below is a great way to build a summary description with quantifiable and comparable metrics, representing the understanding of the overall User eXperience of a product.

Instructions

The Worksheet is broken into sections based on Category as indicated by the blue row starting each.

Beneath each Worksheet Category are the variables that make up the associated category.

To the right of the Category variable names is the Description column providing quick guidance regarding how to quantify each variable. More detailed guidance and examples can be found within article series posted on The Product Guy.

The next two columns “Select One” and “Select All that Apply” contain the variable values. When a variable has values listed within the “Select One” column, only the variable that best describes the current product’s characteristic is selected and copied, within the same row, to the Total Value column.

When a variable has values listed within the “Select All that Apply” column, each value whose Description matches the current product is mirrored into the Total Value column.

The Accessibility value is calculated differently than all the other variables. The value associated with the Accessibility variable comes from the normalized result of a 3^rd party application. To obtain this value we use a robust (and free) proxy for quickly assessing a product’s Accessibility through the use of the Functional Accessibility Evaluator (fae) link. The fae’s resultant scores are averages which, in turn, are normalized to a range from zero to one to represent the value for Quick-UX‘s Accessibility variable.

The Total Values associated with each Category will automatically update…

… as will the Quick-UX Rating at the bottom of the table.

Quick-UX Summary boils it all down into one single page, from each variable value to handy visual representations.

I also find it handy to use for tracking product progress over time, as well as instantly overlaying against products.

As an additional note, the Quick-UX Worksheet is pre-populated with sample data to make it easier to dive in and get started. As you assess your products, just replace/add/remove the variable values within the Total Value column to match your findings. (Remember, only modified the Total Value entries within the non-blue rows — everything else will update automatically for you.)

VIEW THE QUICK-UX WORKSHEET

Enjoy!

Jeremy Horn
The Product Guy

About these ads

The Product Guy had another superfine year in 2009, sharing and exploring products, their experiences, and many innovative startups and the founders behind them, while getting to meet and speak with many of The Product Guy’s steadily growing readership.

And, as 2009 comes to a close, as I did last year, let’s take a brief look at the top posts that made this year on The Product Guy so totally superfine….

#9 Quick-UX Credibility from Likexo to Etsy Quick-UX Credibility is a measure of the starting point, the foundation of a product’s Credibility. A look at the popular (and not so popular) examples of web product Credibility online.
#8 World’s Best Programmer is… [w/ Respect] The World’s Best Programmer wants respect. And, respect is just one of those conditions prevalent within the environment of the World’s Best Programmer. In this last post in the series The Product Guy reveals just who exactly is World’s Best Programmer, and where/how they thrive!!
#7 Converted by an Android. A short story of Gmail, in parts. Part 1 in a series exploring the eventual adoption of Gmail in one’s daily life, by one once thoroughly addicted to, dependent on, the primarily client-based solution of Microsoft’s Outlook, what brought about this conversion, why it took so long, and what should be done to encourage greater Gmail adoption.
#6 jQuery Plugin: It’s CuteTime! Many online social products, and more continue to, avoid a formal timestamp format… 2009-10-10 23:14:17 and Thu, October 29, 2004 12:14:19 PM … opting for more user friendly, "warm and fuzzy," human-readable styles… 9 days ago and 5 years ago. As a result, the time has come for the jQuery CuteTime plugin. CuteTime goes beyond similar tools and lets you easily: convert timestamps to ‘cuter’ language-styled forms (e.g. yesterday, 2 hours ago, last year, in the future!), customize the time scales and output formatting, and dynamically update the displayed CuteTime(s) upon request and/or automatically.
#5 The Future: Gmail, Social Media, and You Over the past many weeks I have explored, elaborated, and exhausted the extent of the then existent exercising of resistance. Now, with such resistance eroded, drawn out through my conversion by an Android, an exploration into the Future of Gmail and the ‘Should Do’ … Readability, Simplify, Organize, Integration and Consistency.
#4 Google: True Colors Shine Through In answering the question of Desirability, "Do I want it?" the sub-category of Color Scheme plays an important role. Google Search is an outstanding example of a Good Color Scheme demonstrating alignment of both colors and messaging. Learn from it.
#3 Stardoll: Lost and Naked When you look at a web page, the various elements of the page can often be seen coalescing into distinguishable regions and groups. Intentionally structured, or otherwise, these groups that constitute the page Layout play an important role in the web product’s Desirability. Stardoll is a great example of a web product with Poor Sequential Flow.
#2 ThreeDots: The jQuery Ellipsis Plugin Many online products employ ellipses within their products to improve various aspects of the User Experience, such as: allowing for easy summary scanning of page content, and fitting more diversity of content into a smaller space. As a result, the time has come for the jQuery ThreeDots plugin. ThreeDots goes beyond similar tools and lets you easily and smartly truncate text for when: text is too long, text doesn’t fit within the available space, you want to employ highly configurable and flexible ellipses within your web product.
#1 Quick-UX. Quick Heuristics for User eXperience. Quick-UX provides for the rapid, simple and quantifiable assessment of a product’s User Experience (UX), consisting of the core components of Usability (‘Can I use it?’), Usefulness (‘Should I use it?’), and Desirability (‘Do I want to use it?’). Quick-UX provides a sure-fire, rapid way to obtain concrete and comparable means by which to assess a single product or compare its strengths and weaknesses to other products. Growing in popularity by leaps and bounds since its original posting in 2008, this posting has earned prime placement amongst other, more recent, articles that made this year, 2009, SUPERFINE.

This year also saw the launch of The Product Group (sponsored by Balsamiq Studios) in NYC as an opportunity for Product People of all sorts and levels of experience to meet, interact, and network, in a laid-back, conversational environment. I am certain 2010 will bring many more exciting gatherings, discoveries, and opportunities; and for those reasons, this too, also helped make 2009 for both Product People and The Product Guy, superfine!