FLUID-1408: UX Toolkit: Review & determine necessary updates to the UX Toolkit

Description

The UX Toolkit pages serve an audience looking for advice/guidance on user-centered design processes, potentially with some interest in Fluid materials (e.g. possibly our Personas). However, often they are looking for guidance on a process (e.g. User Testing) vs. Fluid results of a process (e.g. Fluid User Testing Results).

Some of these UX Toolkit pages are also linked to from the Fluid User Experience section of the wiki (which is more targeted to folks working on Fluid). When some of these pages were changed to fit better into the User Experience space, sometimes it undermined their ability to serve the needs of users of the UX Toolkit.

We need to assess where we need two different pages – one for User Experience and one for UX Toolkit – and make recommendations about necessary updates. I think the User Testing page (http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/User+Testing) is a good example of this. This page "lives" in the UX Toolkit, but really is more User Experience-focused. We should also move pages to the most appropriate of those two spaces if needed as part of this task.

Comments

• Allison Bloodworth commented 2008-09-02T15:16:00.000-0400

  iteration23

• Daphne Ogle commented 2008-12-03T18:36:41.000-0500

  Erin, Allison and Daphne discussed the UX Toolkit today and we think there is some overall IA work that needs to be done to the UX Toolkit and the UX area before we dig into this too deeply. Allison will be identifying the current IA and all the content we have along with thinking about strategies for a new IA this iteration. The 3 of us will then work together to define a new IA through card sorting or something similar. Next iteration we'll create new tasks for digging deeper into the content of the UX Toolkit.

• Allison Bloodworth commented 2008-12-12T17:34:47.000-0500

  I made most of the changes from these recommendations I discussed with Daphne & Erin:

  • Create sections (or just move content in some cases) in User Experience for: Open Source Design Pattern Library Working Group, Fluid Personas, Fluid UX Walkthroughs & Fluid User Testing, and move the related content for these activities there
  • Create a new User Experience page that de-emphasizes the UX Toolkit tools a bit and list the other things in that section a bit better (e.g. the activities we've performed like UX Walkthroughs, Content Management Research, & uCamps; the outputs like Pain Points & Problem Spaces, Fluid Personas, & the UX Toolkit; and the "administrative" info for the Fluid User Experience Group like the OSDPL Working Group, Design Meetings, Wiki Templates, Glossary (though I could also see this being in the UX Toolkit if it wasn't so Fluid-focused), Summit UX Summary, UX Activity Planning, & UX info about our partner projects)
  • Consider moving "Design & Development Process" & "User Matrices" out of UX Toolkit and into User Experience section
  • Come up with a standard naming convention for UX Toolkit items (e.g. either "User Testing" or "User Testing Overview") and use it across the board for all "tools" in the toolkit
  • Have a standard place to find templates associated with a toolkit item, such as a "User Testing Templates" page. Perhaps we could then excerpt them all into a central "UX Toolkit Templates" page.
  • Move various things out of UX Toolkit or User Experience section and put them under their related components (e.g. Comparison of Drag & Drop Implementations, Tagging, UI Options stuff)
  • Consider using labels to point to the Fluid materials on a particular toolkit page (e.g. see how it is done on the Competitive Analysis page: http://wiki.fluidproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=1706405)

  With the following exceptions:

  • did not add a page to consolidate Fluid User Testing Results--we can add that later if we need it.
  • moved User Matrices under Contextual Inquiry in UX Toolkit instead of moving to User Experience. Perhaps that one and the "user behavior and characteristic matrices" should actually have their own space at some point (because they can apply to any type of user research), but since they are currently only referenced by contextual inquiry that's where I moved them. If you guys think they should have their own top level category now, feel free to add it. 🙂
  • did not set up a standard place to find templates associated with a toolkit item, such as a "User Testing Templates" page yet - and it didn't seem terribly necessary with the limited work I did in the Contextual Inquiry space
  • did not do anything with labels