Task Design - Paper Prototyping: The Fast and Easy Way to Define and Refine User Interfaces - page 96

Step 2: List Your Questions
Next, make a list of all the questions and concerns you have about the product. As discussed in the
previous chapter , identifying risks and concerns is a helpful thing to do during the kickoff meeting, so
you might use that list as your starting point. Some issues might be based on user feedback while
others are just a nagging feeling in someone's mind. They are often, but not always, necessarily
phrased as questions. Some issues are fairly specific, as illustrated by the following examples compiled
from several projects:
Source/destination—do users understand these terms, or are they too technical?
When the free version times out after 30 days, have we broken their expectations? Will they buy it,
or just be mad at us?
Some people print the preview, which doesn't look very good. How can we get them to print the
PDF instead?
Do users understand the Reset/Clear buttons in the Watch list?
Tech support gets lots of calls about forgotten passwords. How can we fix this online?
Or you might find that your questions are broad or vague:
How do people discover new music, such as music by similar but unknown artists? How do they
decide what music to buy?
Users come to the site for the free materials, but we want them to become buyers. What would
help with this? Showing sample pages of new topics?
We don't know which aspects of account management our customers want to do online. Does
anyone really care about account aggregation?
We've gotten feedback that the interface is "disjointed." You can end up someplace without clearly
knowing how you got there. No one can give us a specific example, though, so we're not sure what
this means.
It's not necessary to separate the issues into specific and broad — I've done this to help with the next
point I'm going to make. Just brainstorm a list of the things your team is most concerned about, and
write them in whatever order they come up. A typical team comes up with a couple dozen issues; you
might have even more.