Course

Effective Period

: User Experience
: September 2016

User Research
Session 04

Acknowledgement
These slides have been adapted from

A Project Guide to UX Design: for User Experience

Designers in the Field or in The Making, Russ Unger
and Carolyn Chandler, Second Edition,
New Riders. ISBN: 978-0-321-81538-5. Chapter 5.

Smashing UX Design : Foundations for

Designing Online User Experiences, Jesmond
Alen and James Chudley, First Edition, Books
Library. ISBN: 978-0-470-66685-2 Chapter 2, 3

Learning Objectives
LO 3 : Apply design principles to prototyping and design
UX.

Contents

Basic Steps of User Research

Define Your User groups
Choosing Research Techniques
Case : User Research

Basic Steps of User Research

User research focuses on understanding user behaviors,
needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task
analysis, and other feedback methodologies. Mike Kuniaysky
further notes that it is the process of understanding the
impact of design on an audience.
The types of user research you can or should perform will
depend on the type of site, system or app you are developing,
your timeline, and your environment.
UX research encompasses a variety of investigative methods
used to add context and insight to the design process.
The main goal of design research is to inform the design
process from the perspective of the end user.
Research has two parts: gathering data, and synthesizing that
data in order to improve usability.

Basic Steps of User Research

(cont)
At the start of the project, design research is focused on learning
about project requirements from stakeholders, and learning about
the needs and goals of the end users.
Researchers will conduct interviews, collect surveys, observe
prospects or current users, and review existing literature, data, or
analytics.
Then, iteratively throughout the design process, the research focus
shifts to usability and sentiment.
We can also divide UX research methods into two camps:
quantitative and qualitative.
Quantitative researchis any research that can be measured
numerically.
Qualitative researchis sometimes called soft research. It
helps us understand why people do the things they do, and
often takes the form of interviews or conversations.

Basic Steps of User Research

(cont)

Basic Steps of User Research

(cont)

Define your primary user groups. This involves creating a framework

that describes the main types of users youre designing forallowing
you to focus your efforts in recruiting users for research.
Plan for user involvement. This includes choosing one or more
techniques for involving user groups in research, based on the needs of
your project.
Conduct the research. Well cover the basic techniques here, such as
interviews and surveys, and provide tips on how to go about them.
Validate your user group definitions. Using what you learned from
the research, you can solidify your user groups model. This model will
then serve as a platform for the development of more detailed tools,
such as personas (discussed in session 5).
Generate user requirements. These are statements of the features
and functions that the site may include. Add to business requirements
and prioritize them to become project requirements

Define Your User groups

One of the main objectives of research is better defining your current or potential
user base.
User group definitions can be high level (a list defining each of your target user
groups) or detailed and visual (a diagram showing multiple types of users, as well
as how they interact with each other).
As you begin defining groups for user research, youll start prioritizing user
groups in more detail.
Future user base include, but are not limited to:
Demographics(i.e. age, gender, location, income, etc.)
Environment and usage trends(i.e. use location, use time, tool context,
frequency of use, loyalty, etc.)
Values and attitudes(i.e. media, activities, needs, desires, etc.)
Knowledge and tasks(i.e. product knowledge, competitive awareness,
duration, order, method, etc.)
Roles(i.e. titles, responsibilities, training, relationships, interactions with
others, etc.)
Goals(i.e. short-term, long-term, motivation, success outcomes, pain, etc.)

Define Your User groups

Here are the basic steps for defining your user groups:
1. Create a list of attributes that will help you define the
different users of your site (the next section will cover
some of the most common).
2. Discuss the attributes with those at the company who
have contact with relevant types of users (for example,
customers).
3. Prioritize the attributes that seem to have the largest
impact on why and how a potential user would use your
site or application.
4. Define the user groups that you will focus on in research
and design.

Define Your User groups

Here are some potential sources for create list of attributes :
Documents explaining company strategies, such as
company goals, competitive information, marketing
strategies, and business plans
Market segmentations of current customers and other
demographic data gathered by the marketing department
Previously conducted user research
surveys, such as user satisfaction surveys and feedback
forms
Customer service reports covering frequently occurring
issues
Identify people within the organization who have some
insight into current or prospective users.

Define Your User groups

Ask the group to think of the different types of potential users they
tend to interact with. Then ask them to list some of the common
attributes theyve encountered. Here are some examples of what
could vary:
Primary goals, as they relate to the subject matter of your site. For
example, purchasing an item, trading a stock, or getting a specific
question answered are common goals.
Roles. The roles of user groups as : job seeker, support seeker,
potential client, and so on.
Demographics, including age, sex, family (single, married, children),
income level, and region
Experience including level of education, level of familiarity with
relevant technologies, level of subject matter expertise, and frequency
of usage
Organizational attributes, including the size of the company users
work for, their department, type of job, tenure , and work patterns

Choosing Research Techniques

After define your user groups, its time to plan the next step: your
recommendations for the amount and type of user research
activities to conduct during the project.

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)

* Typical Time Frame represents the time often needed from

the point users are scheduled. Two groups of six to eight
users are assumed (except for surveys, where the number of
users should be larger).
User interviews are structured conversations with current or
potential users of your site.
User interviews can be conducted over the phone, in person in
a neutral location (such as a conference room), or, ideally, in
the environment in which the user is likely to use the site.
Interviews help you understand participant preferences and
attitudes, but they should not be used to make formal
statements about actual performance.

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)

For user interviews, the UX designer creates a list of questions

aimed at eliciting information such as the following:
Relevant experience with the site or with the subject
matter
The companys brand, as experienced by the participant
Attitudes, for example, toward the subject categories
covered (for a content source), the process being designed
(for a task-based application), or methods of marketing
(for a marketing campaign)
Common goals or needs that drive users to your site or
that of a competitor
Common next steps users take after visiting the
companys site
Other people who are involved in the experience.
Any other information that will help you validate the
assumptions youve made about user groups

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)
Contextual inquiry combines user observation with
interviewing techniques. The UX designer goes to
participants, ideally to the environments in which
theyre likely to use the site.
For an office application contextual inquiry would
involve sitting at the participants desk. This method
gives you rich information about the context a
participant works within, including these :
The real-life problems users are facing
The kind of equipment theyre working with
The space theyre working within
Their preference in using a mouse versus keyboard.
How theyre working with others in terms of both
collaboration or sharing
Other tools theyre using, Etc.

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)
Surveys involve a set collection of well-defined questions
distributed to a large audience. They most often consist of
closed-ended questions (such as multiple choice questions)
that can be easily collected with a tool that can display
patterns among responses.
Surveys are good tools when you want to be able to state
results in more quantitative ways and than you would get with
the kinds of open-ended questions that are used in interviews.
However, you can gather qualitative information from them as
well, about user perceptions and attitudes.
In the user experience field, surveys are often used to
measure user satisfaction (with existing sites or applications)
or to build or validate user models like segmentations or
pesonas.
in surveys multiple choice or Yes/no, True/false questions are
best and easiest to analyze afterwards.

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)

Use surveys when you have questions that are factual

requests for demographic data or when you need to ask
questions that are attitudinal with a set range of distinct
choices.

For example:
Read the following statements and select the degree to which you
agree or
disagree with each of them
The Customer service at Pseudo Corporation is responsive to my needs.
______ strongly Agree
______ Agree
______ neither Agree nor Disagree
______ Disagree
______ strongly Disagree

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)
Surveys are an excellent supplement to other forms
of research you may be doing. We can gain
quantitative data from surveys to supplement
qualitative data gained from user interviews or
contextual inquiry
Combining two research methods provides a richer
picture of the user than one method can provide on
its own
Some consideration in planning a survey :
Who are you targeting?
What method for distributing the survey will give you the best
results?
How much time will participants probably be willing to spend
filling out the survey?
How will you know when to start analyzing the data?
What tool will you use to collect and analyze the data?

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)
Focus groups involve bringing together a variety of people
within a target audience and facilitating a discussion with
them. Common goals are to elicit opinions on topics relevant
to the organization or its brand, such as past experiences,
related needs, feelings, attitudes, and ideas for improvement
A focus group is a good technique for several purposes :
Hearing a variety of user stories
Understanding relevant differences in experiences.
Generating ideas.
Understanding multiple points of a collaborative
process.
Card sorting activity, participants are given items printed on
cards and are asked to put them into groups that make sense
to them. this is to create a site map for a website or to create a
hierarchy of content, categories, and subcategories containing
items such as articles, documents, videos, or photos.

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)
Usability testing involves asking participants to
perform specific tests on a site or application or a
prototype, to uncover potential usability issues and
gather ideas to address them.
You can perform usability testing during the Define
phase if you want to gather information on how the
current site can be improved. Or you can perform it
on similar sites to understand some of the
potential opportunities for a more user-friendly
solution.
Most often, usability testing is conducted as part of
the Design phase, ideally in iterative rounds (where
a design is created, tested, refined, and tested
again).

Choosing Research Techniques

(cont)
After the research do :
Review the assumptions you originally made
about your user groups
If the earlier assumptions werent valid, consider
any gaps you may have in your user research
because a key group wasnt included
Adjust and add another set of participants to
research in progress, to ensure youre getting a
full picture.
Revise your user definitions to more accurately
reflect the groups that should be the focus
This will help you create more detailed tools like
personas and will help you create user
requirements.

Case : User Research

Please do user research for Binusmaya, use your friends in
different semester, your lectors/dosen, administrator, and
others as users groups : select minimum 2 techniques for
research. Create kuesioner and do the research.
Make conclusion regarding the information you have collected.
Define User requirement.
---OR---Lectors might create suitable case for
" User Research"

References
A Project Guide to UX Design: for User Experience
Designers in the Field or in The Making. Second Edition.
New Riders. ISBN: 978-0-321-81538-5.
Smashing UX Design : Foundations for Designing Online
User Experiences. First Edition. Books Library. ISBN: 9780-470-66685-2.
Requirements gathering a step by step approach for a
better user experience part-2.
http://usabilitygeek.com/requirements-gathering-a-stepby-step-approach-for-a-better-user-experience-part-2/
User Research Basics
https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/userresearch.html

Q&A