Design Research

Introduction

This lesson contains 4 activities that you should complete as you go through it.

Design Research

In years gone by there was a disconnect between the marketing department who often did the research, and the designers and developers who make and design the product. This is why it is important that the whole team be involved at the research level so that everyone has an equal understanding of the user.

Quantitative vs Qualitative

Market research tends to be focussed more on quantitative rather than qualitative data. Quantitative data is concerned with quantity (how many) whereas qualitative data is concerned with quality and in-depth knowledge.

We gather quantitative data by analysing web analytics, market segmentation and broad user analysis. This is great at telling us what people want to buy, but it doesn’t help us understand why they want to buy it and how they want to interact.

It can be useful to start with quantitative research to analyse what segment our user is likely to be from, then perform qualitative research to understand more about them in depth. Then later, once we have our models in place, quantitative data can help us understand how a particular persona fits into our wider user group.

The difficulty of quantitative data is that it focusses on data points like clicks, time on site, surveys, etc. But unfortunately the user can’t be reduced to a click. They’re much more complex with moods and desires, and therefore require analyses that capture these complexities.

Learn About the Product

Before you can start your research you need to understand what the product is and how it works. You can get this insight by having meetings with the various stakeholders, and by researching the field yourself. Sometimes you’ll be working in a field in which you are unfamiliar and you’ll need to spend some time reading and researching to understand the context in which the business operates.

Remember, even though we are focussed on the user’s goals, it is critical to analyse the business goals to make sure we’re building a sustainable product for the client.

Meetings with the stakeholders offer insight into their business goals, but also into any constraints and limitations that exist. Most of the stakeholders are knowledgeable about their own product, so use this to your advantage.

You can also interview Subject Matter Experts who have specific insights and understandings in a particular field. They might be ‘super-users’ and so it’s important to understand that your users might differ from them.

Collect Qualitative Data

When you are collecting user data it’s important to get representative users doing representative tasks. There’s no use collecting data from people who aren’t like your end users, and who are not completing tasks related to your product.

It’s best to conduct interviews and assessments in a location where the user is likely to use your product. This gives you insight that you might otherwise never have gotten, plus it helps the user to relax and feel at ease. Ideally they shouldn’t feel analysed in a scientific way, but rather see your meeting with them as a collaboration.

Observing users is often better than interviews because people aren’t easily able to self-assess and communicate issues they encounter. Sometimes a user will have found a workaround solution to a problem that they wouldn’t think to share in an interview, but you’ll spot these when observing. Do they have passwords on sticky notes next to their computer? Do they always need to Google something before they can complete a task?

Try to observe them rather than leading them through any processes. Ask open-ended questions that can get them talking and explaining what they’re doing. You should take on the role of the apprentice and have them explaining what they want and any issues they have. Listen for any goals they might have as this will give you insights later to determine what the user really wants.

When interviewing and observing users, we need to have open minds to see and explore various elements of the design and their interaction with it. It’s very unlikely that you will get a homogenous group of users. This means that you are also unlikely to get easy answers for major design decisions early on in the process. Over a series of iterations you will probably start to see certain patterns emerge.

It’s important to note that there is a difference between users and customers. They are usually the same people, but in large corporate enterprises or scientific and medical organisations, the users might be very different to the customers. For example, at a school, the teachers might be the users, while the principal might be the customer who will actually pay for the product.

Contextual Inquiry

The following is a technique that will help you in conducting interviews and observations with users. It was developed by Beyer and Holtzblatt and is called Contextual Inquiry and places an emphasis on conducting observations within a specific context and environment. Try going to their workplace or home to see how they would normally interact.

It is important that you create a partnership with the person you are observing and that they feel like they are leading the exploration to solve problems and overcome issues.

When interpreting the sessions, you need to read between the lines to understand and un-pack why users say and do certain things. Remember, users aren’t as objective as they might seem.

Conclude Research

When you have finished observing users you need to extract that data and make it useful and understandable. You need to start grouping certain goals, issues and other attributes that the various users had.

It’s best to do this as close to when you have collected the research in order to ensure accuracy. This phase of grouping users based on similar attributes leads us on to personas, which we’ll be covering in the next lesson.

Activities

Activity 1

| WATCH

Video: Contextual Inquiry (10m) | | :-: |

Activity 2

| WATCH

Video: UX Research Methods: Interviewing (35m) | | :-: |

Activity 3

| WATCH

Video: Analyzing User Data (30m) | | :-: |

Activity 4

| READ

From About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design Paperback, 2014, by Alan Cooper et.al. 
Chapter 2: ‘Understanding the Problem: Design Research’. (2h) | | :-: |

Lesson Task

Brief

You will continue to work on your cross-course project. This is the one you designed and built in the first semester.

In this task, we’re going to conduct some design research for your chosen site by looking at two or three competitor websites and asking users to interact with them.

In normal projects, you’d perform a lot more interviews, but for this task we will just be doing one so that you can get a feel for how it would go.

Level 1 Process

• Choose two or three websites for the user to work with.

• Choose specific tasks that you want the user to do. Eg. Find a red jacket that costs less than $…

• Next, sit down with the potential user at a computer (if you can’t physically sit down with them, then a video conference call will work).

• Ask the users to perform the specific tasks you decided on, and encourage them to give feedback as they work. Try not to lead them, but let them explain why they’re doing certain things, and what they like/don’t like about each site.

• After the interview, consider what surprised you about how the user interacted with the websites, and what they did as expected. Were there any sticking points which could be made easier for the user? What did they like and what didn’t they like on the different sites?

Level 2 Process

• Ask the user to interact with your website. Give them the same tasks you asked them to perform with the competitor websites. How did your site fare in comparison? Can you see where you might make adjustments?

• Consider performing further contextual inquiry interviews with other users to see what they think. The more users you interview, the more rounded a perspective you can get.