UCD Activities: How Many?

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Results

Discussion

Of those individuals who reported performing a specific activity, how many times did they perform that activity in a given year? The above chart presents the mean number of times that specific activities were performed in 2000 by individuals who performed those activities. Things to keep in mind when viewing these data are:

• No respondents performed all activities, so do not think that you have to perform 153 surveys and 52 miscellaneous UCD deliverables and 16 usability tests, et cetera.
• The averages for the Survey (Other) and Miscellaneous UCD Deliverables (Other) activities are much larger than other activities. These averages were inflated by a couple of respondents who apparently administered a lot of surveys and delivered a lot of UCD deliverables. As you can see, the average activity rates for other activities drop to more reasonable levels for all other activities.

The activities that respondents perform run the gamut - they are not just usability testing. People created/performed some of the less main-stream activities like Vision Scope documents and Storyboards less often than some of the more main-stream activities like Usability Testing and Customer Interviews. Monolithic activities like Contextual Inquiries were also performed less frequently, although performing 5 contextual inquiries in one year is quite a feat. It is interesting to note that there is not really a precipitous drop, but rather a steady decline from the more-common activities to the least-common activities (with the exception of the Survey (Other) and Miscellaneous UCD Deliverables (Other) categories).