Interviewing users is a good place to start the process. Listening and observing users is a crucial part of ux design and can occur throughout the process. Listening is the hardest and most important skill in interviewing and it needs to occur on several levels. At the same time - I'm carefull of respecting boundaries and make sure I'm asking open-ended, non-judgemntal questions.

Writing survey question is something I do carefully. First I make sure the survey is clear and relevant to my objective. There’s nothing worse than a survey that goes on and on. Respondants will skip questions if a survey is too long, so I keep it short and on topic and ensure the questions are not confusing. I like to keep the respondent informed by telling them how long the survey will take and how many pages it is. I’ll try and ask only questions that will influence design (I’ll consider questions outside this rule carefully). I’ll pre-test the survey to check my decision making.

Personas can help increase the focus on users and their needs, and are often seen as an effective communication tool. They can lead to better design decisions and help define the product’s feature set. The special aspect of a persona description is that it is specifically related to the context associated with the area of work.

I look at what's out there already. Who does what and how well are they doing it. Where are they and how do they compare to each other?

A Competitive analysis identifies the strengths and weaknesses of competing products or services before starting work on prototypes. Findings are tabled and compared in an overall format. From this opportunities and challenges can be identified. I research competitors and use the 10 Usability Heuristics (10 usability heuristics originally defined by Jakob Nielsen in 1994) as a guide to comparing the various applications or websites.

Strategy is important because it articulates the brand, the background to the project and the guiding principles of an organisation. The strategy will shape the Project Goals - what the organisation is trying to achieve and how its success should be measured. I create and prioritize the problem statements and test with hypotheses statements.