The UCD Catalyst: How it Works

The UCD Catalyst is a tool to help you generate project plans for your user interface design projects. For each stage of the UI design process, you choose what you want to produce (deliverables), how you want to produce them (activities), and the risk factors that might affect the project. After entering everything, you will have an estimate for how long the project will take.

How to Use the UCD Catalyst

Deliverables

Deliverable: Something that you produce as part of a project. Interim deliverables are stepping stones that ultimately help you create the deliverables you are getting paid for. Personas ans scenarios, for example, are interim deliverables that help you model users and tasks, which you do so that you can deliver the actual design. If you're getting paid to deliver wireframes and specs, that's your "real" deliverable. For someone else, though, they are the interim deliverables on the way to the ultimate deliverable: functioning software.

When choosing deliverables in the UCD catalyst, you can either add your own or click the See Suggestions link to see a set of typical deliverables for that stage of UI design. Select the deliverables you like and click Add Suggestions to add them to the plan.

In the UCD Catalyst, each deliverable has an editable name and description (called Good For). You can select the level of formality, though that doesn't affect the estimate. Sometimes a whiteboard sketch is enough to get the job done, and other times you need to have a detailed, polished spec that looks professionally printed. After deciding on each of those, add the number of hours you think it will take to produce the deliverable.

Activities

Activities: The work you do to be able to produce a deliverable. If a persona is the deliverable, typical activities might be user interviews or contextual interviews. I think of activities as the analysis and research work. So, the work of writing the persona I estimate in the Deliverables section, but the planning and user research I estimate separately as activities.

After adding new activities, click on the Name or Good For text to edit it and make it more specific to your project. Finally, add the number of hours you think it will take to do the activity's work.

Risk Factors

Risk Factors: Any aspect of the project or event outside your control that might affect the time needed to finish the project on time. In project management, a risk can be either positive or negative. Since the word risk has a negative connotation in regular language, I've simply called them Factors in the the UCD Catalyst.

Each Risk has an editable name and description (called The Issue). A Risk's Effect determines whether it helps or harms the project. Each choice in the Effect select box has a number that the UCD Catalyst multiplies with the hours estimates from the Deliverables and Activities.

Finally, each Factor has a What To Do box where you can specify the actions you want to take - either to reduce the Factor's likelihood or mitigate the impact if it should occur.

Saving and Printing Your Plan

You can save a plan to your computer as a .json file. Clicking Save will save the file to your default Downloads location, with the filename being your plan's title.

To load the plan, click the Load option in the toolbar on the plan page. Choose the file you saved to upload it. Any previous information will be overwritten.