Planning III: Creating a UCD estimate
February 4, 2009 (over a year ago)
To ensure we set realistic expectations with the business, we clearly document our recommended UCD approaches. Here’s what it looks like…
So we’ve chosen which UCD methods to use and worked out the costs involved. Now we need to put our two recommendations to the business with our UCD estimates.
What is it?
Two timelines showing the steps we intend to take, the costs involved and how long it will take, based on the two recommendations we’ve come up with. You can see an example below:
Screenshot of UCD estimate (click to download Word doc)
How do I use it?
This should be quite straightforward: for each recommendation just add your chosen methods to the Word doc with their duration and costs, and add your normal design tasks (sketching, creating lo-do mockups etc) in between. Add it all up and present these to the project owner. This transparency helps them understand what steps, costs and time are involved.
Why two estimates?
This begins a better conversation with the project owner: “Would you like to involve users in this way or this way?” rather than “Would you like to involve users?” (which is all too easy to say no to). The question should not be “How much money or time do we have?” but “How important is it that we understand our users and we build the ‘right’ product for them?”.
Download
- UCD estimate (24KB Word document)
Previous iterations
Our first iteration just listed the time and money costs without showing the traditional design tasks (such as creating hifi mockups). This made the timelines ambiguous as the user involvement was being taken out if context of the design process as a whole. So we added these traditional tasks in and now the whole thing is a lot clearer.