Q:
I'm doing the design and development of a video game store that is about to open. I'm thinking on giving it the full UX/personality treatment and document it.
How would you go about documenting the whole process? What would you absolutely include? What would you leave out?
By the way, I'm one of the owners of the store.
A:
First, congratulations on the store, sounds cool! Here are my thoughts regarding the documentation of your product review.
When documenting a process, I tend to lean toward over-documentation, that way you have a hearty record of as much detail as possible. I say this, though I tend to be pretty crappy at actually DOING this. ;)
When communicating or sharing the documentation you've gathered, edit it down to the most important points. There can be a lot of interesting or fascinating discoveries along the way. It might be great to pull a few key points where applying a personality caused some significant changes, and similarly, it would be great to see if/when/where rethinking things with a personality approach maybe did not change anything. I believe it's important to capture good things as well as things that maybe didn't work out. Learnings are important, both positive and negative.
For example, you may showcase where some of your UX micro-copy underwent rethinking/rewriting, in order to give it more personality. And by contrast, you may do a full review of your product and find that the wording for error messages should need to remain as they are in order to avoid confusion or diluting the seriousness of certain actions.
Like we do with the products themselves, it is also incredibly useful to get feedback on your documentation. Ask some colleagues or potential users, friends, family, etc to review your documentation and talk about the pieces they found to be the most interesting, surprising or helpful.
There are tons of ways to document things, finding your own style could be a fun part of this whole activity. I have a friend (@thomasknoll) who’s just started a really cool thing, you may want to check out what he’s doing here for inspiration: Setting up a lab-notebook for a scientific-method approach to marketing
Keep me posted on what you do here! I'd love to watch it all unfold. :)