Design Reports October 30, 2018

Learning Objectives

Identify elements of a successful design report

…And that’s it!

The goal today is simply to get you started thinking about what goes into a report. In practice, designers typically only write lengthy prosaic reports as a deliverable to summarize findings from user research (often to handoff to other designers). We’ll modify this approach a bit to produce reports about our work throughout the class, especially on solo projects. This will help you to document as you go, giving you plenty of content to help you put together your portfolio once class is over. It will also serve as the record of your work that you’ll review with one of the TAs in a 1-on-1.

Keep in mind

This report is made for people that don’t know what your project is about and want to understand your design process as well as how you think
Remember to document all your process during the time of the project (you will include photos: 80% text and 20% photos)
Write down the WHY of everything you do (recruiters will want to see how you think and how you relate the UX to the UI)
Throughout the report, remember to briefly (one sentence) explain the tools that you use. Not everyone knows what an affinity diagram is for example.
Put keywords in bold. Don’t overload of bold, if not it loses its importance

Suggested structure

1. Agenda of your report

The result of the agenda should be an outline of all the parts you are going to develop in your report. It is very useful for the reader to be able to quickly refer to the part(s) that interests him/her the most.

2. Overview

Introduce the scope of the project (How many days? Instructions? group/individual?)
Explain the origin of the project (Why this topic? What were the instructions? Constraints?)
Give a company overview (in case the project is about a specific company)
Sum up your process and explain the main idea behind the project

3. Part 1: UX

Introduce your initial steps / assumptions
Explain how you organised your research (Tools?)
For each step, explain the goal and the process you went through and mainly the why you went through this step
Analyze the results, give some data and explain your findings
Affinity diagram, problem statement, user persona, features, sum it up in the project scope
Show some iterations based on low-fi, mid-fi and high-fi (explain the changes made through testing)

4. Part 2: UI

Show your Style Tile and explain your choices (why these colors and typography, what feeling did you wanted to convey…)
Explain any extra testing done on your high-fi and changes
Add the link to your Invision prototype (and Principle?)

5. Part 3: Learnings & Next Steps

Explain next steps: what features you would add / change
Learnings: what did you learn? what were you biggest challenges?
Try to focus on a personal point of view
What would you do differently next time?

6. Appendix

In order to not overload the report, some elements might be added in the appendix such as:

Survey questions
Survey answers
Interview guide
Interview notes

Resources

Designing Case Studies: Showcasing A Human-Centered Design Process by Senongo Akpem
Questions I ask when reviewing a design by Jason Fried

UX/UI 10/18