Put your prototype’s visual design and layout to the test with potential users and their preferences.
👥 10 and more | ⏰ days | 💪🏼 high effort
Objectives
Desirability studies play an important role in discovering your customer’s potential attitudes and emotional responses toward a prototype’s visual design direction.
Because visual presentation supports a product’s usability, teams will want to validate that a chosen solution and its initial visual designs are met with good first impressions and perceptions of utility and credibility. At the end of a desirability study, the team can expect to receive a list of responses, usually in the form of adjectives or attributes, concerning how the participant emotionally reacted to a particular direction.
Who is involved?
Desirability studies require a recruiter to source participants who are willing to come into the building and communicate their emotional or attitudinal responses to your prototype’s visual designs; a moderator to present the mockups to participants; a note-taker or video recorder to capture responses so the moderator can focus on facilitating the session; and a team to synthesise the results and identify winning (and losing) visual directions.
How is it done?
- To get the most from this study, create several high-fidelity, visually differentiated mockups to show participants, capturing all the different interface and style directions the solution could pursue.
- Recruit participants who are capable of opening up and communicating their emotional responses to the mockups presented.
- Create index cards with a variety of adjectives or attributes (both good and bad) that could be said about your solution; or, leverage decks that have already been created, like the 118 Product Reaction Cards from Microsoft.
- During the sessions, present each visual direction and have participants select the cards that best describe their emotions or attitudes toward its style and layout.
- After enough responses have been collected, come together as a team and determine which direction aligns with your product goals, based on the adjectives and attributes selected by participants.
Source:
https://www.slideshare.net/almingwork/nyt-product-discovery-activity-guide