Think Like a UX Researcher: How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy PDF
Preview Think Like a UX Researcher: How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy
Think Like a UX Researcher How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy Think Like a UX Researcher How to Observe Users, Influence Design, and Shape Business Strategy David Travis Philip Hodgson CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group 6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW, Suite 300 Boca Raton, FL 33487-2742 © 2019 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business No claim to original U.S. Government works Printed on acid-free paper International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-138-36529-2 (Paperback) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-1-138-36535-3 (Hardback) This book contains information obtained from authentic and highly regarded sources. Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their use. 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Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the CRC Press Web site at http://www.crcpress.com v Contents • Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix 1 Setting the Stage 1 ◻ The Seven Deadly Sins of UX Research 2 ◻ Think Like a Detective 10 ◻ The Two Questions We Answer with UX Research 18 ◻ Anatomy of a Research Question 21 ◻ Applying Psychology to UX Research 28 ◻ Why Iterative Design Isn’t Enough to Create Innovative Products 33 ◻ Does your Company Deliver a Superior Customer Experience? 38 2 Planning User Experience Research 43 ◻ Defining Your UX Research Problem 44 ◻ How to Approach Desk Research 51 ◻ Conducting an Effective Stakeholder Interview 56 ◻ Identifying the User Groups for Your UX Research 64 ◻ Writing the Perfect Participant Screener 69 ◻ Arguments Against a Representative Sample 75 ◻ How to Find More Usability Problems with Fewer Participants 81 ◻ Deciding on Your First Research Activity with Users 85 3 Conducting User Experience Research 89 ◻ Gaining Informed Consent from Your Research Participants 90 ◻ What Is Design Ethnography? 96 ◻ Structuring the Ethnographic Interview 100 ◻ Writing Effective Usability Test Tasks 106 ◻ The Five Mistakes You’ll Make as a Usability Test Moderator 110 vi ConTEnTS ◻ Avoiding Personal opinions in Usability Expert Reviews 116 ◻ Toward a Lean UX 121 ◻ Controlling Researcher Effects 128 4 Analyzing User Experience Research 135 ◻ Sharpening Your Thinking Tools 136 ◻ UX Research and Strength of Evidence 145 ◻ Agile Personas 150 ◻ How to Prioritize Usability Problems 156 ◻ Creating Insights, Hypotheses and Testable Design Ideas 160 ◻ How to Manage Design Projects with User Experience Metrics 166 ◻ Two Measures that Will Justify Any Design Change 173 ◻ Your Web Survey Is a Lot Less Reliable than You Think 177 5 Persuading People to Take Action on the Results of User Experience Research 183 ◻ Evangelizing UX Research 184 ◻ How to Create a User Journey Map 195 ◻ Generating Solutions to Usability Problems 203 ◻ Building UX Research Into the Design Studio Methodology 208 ◻ Dealing with Common objections to UX Research 215 ◻ The User Experience Debrief Meeting 221 ◻ Creating a User Experience Dashboard 228 ◻ Achieving Boardroom Influence 234 6 Building a Career in User Experience 241 ◻ Hiring a User Experience Leader 242 ◻ A Tool for Assessing and Developing the Technical Skills of User Experience Practitioners 248 ◻ Going Beyond Technical Skills: What Makes a Great UX Researcher? 260 ◻ How to Wow People with Your UX Research Portfolio 267 ◻ A Week-by-Week Guide to Your First Month in a UX Research Role 273 ◻ The Reflective UX Researcher 278 Endnotes 283 Index 289 vii Acknowledgments • Many of our colleagues have provided insight, ideas, and comments on the essays in this volume. In alphabetical order, we would like to thank nigel Bevan, David Hamill, Miles Hunter, Caroline Jarrett, John Knight, Beth Maddix, Rolf Mohlich, Ali Vassigh, and Todd Zazelenchuk. We are indebted to Gret Higgins and Lynne Tan for help in proof-reading and curating the essays. Any remaining errors are, of course, ours. We are also indebted to the hundreds of UX researchers who signed up at our website, uxresearchbook.com, and helped shape decisions on everything from the book’s content to the cover design. Your comments and opinions helped us improve the book, and we hope that you’re as proud of the final result as we are. Finally, we would also like to thank our many students and clients who have asked us difficult questions over the years. Those questions made us think like a UX Researcher and led directly to many of the essays in this book. ix Introduction • Currently, user experience (UX) researchers are in an enviable situation. There are many more jobs than people suitably trained to fill them. Practitioners are swamped with work. This has obvious advantages—but it comes with its own share of problems. not least of these problems is the difficulty of maintaining one’s own area of expertise by staying up to date with best practice and new ideas. We know from the training courses we deliver to UX researchers that many are too busy (and may feel too knowledgeable) to read a compre- hensive, introductory text on user experience. In fact, if you’re like us, you probably have more than one UX book on your shelves that you started but couldn’t finish. That’s why UX researchers turn to shorter articles and blog posts to keep their knowledge fresh. But blog posts aren’t curated. It’s not clear how they fit together because they lack the kind of structure imposed by a book. And they vary in quality—both in the quality of the content and the quality of the writing. With printed books feeling overwhelming and the quality of blog posts being too variable, it’s not clear what UX researchers are meant to do to stay current. This book aims to bridge the gap by providing user experience content that is authoritative but at the same time easily digestible. It contains a series of essays on UX research. Although you could read the book from cover to cover, we have planned the book on the assumption that you will dip in and out of it, somewhat like a bedside or coffee-break reader. Think of it as a launch pad for UX research ideas. But if you prefer to read linearly, we’ve organized the chapters (and the sequence of essays within each chapter) to build upon each other. x InTRoDUCTIon This Book Is Not Just for UX Researchers Who should read this book? • UX researchers who want inspiration and stimulation in various aspects of their craft. If that’s you, dip in anywhere—but especially Chapters 1 through 4. • Project owners and Scrum masters who want to stimulate discussion of UX research with their development team. If that’s you, turn to any essay in this book and pick a discussion question (you’ll find these at the end of every essay in a section titled “Think Like a UX Researcher”). • Designers who want to get user feedback on a new product idea or a prototype. If that’s you, turn to the essays in Chapter 3 to avoid many of the common bloopers in UX research. • Business analysts and marketing managers who want to persuade development teams, senior managers and stakeholders to take action on the results of UX research. If that’s you, review the essays in Chapter 5. • Anyone who wants to build a career in user experience. We wrote the essays in Chapter 6 just for you. In a Nutshell The book has six chapters. The first chapter contains some introductory essays that set the stage for the later parts of the book. It covers topics such as the kinds of question you can answer with UX research, common mistakes made by practitioners, and how to apply psychology to UX research. Chapter 2 covers the planning and preparation phase of UX research. The essays in this section will help you decide if UX research is needed on a project, and if so what kind of research to do. It will help you take the first steps with your research, for example in deciding what kinds of participants to include. Chapter 3 focuses on conducting UX research. This is where you engage with users and observe them working in either natural or controlled envi- ronments. It is the phase of research in which you collect data. The essays in this chapter will help you gain informed consent from your research partici- pants, run an ethnographic interview and avoid common usability testing mistakes. xi InTRoDUCTIon Chapter 4 discusses data analysis: the process of turning raw data into a story. This is where the meaning of your findings, and the insights and “Aha!” moments, start to emerge. It’s the “So what?” of a UX research study. Chapter 5 describes how to persuade people to take action on the results of your UX research. This chapter will help you confidently stand your ground with development team members critical of UX research. The chapter covers both persuading the development team and persuading senior managers and stakeholders. The final chapter of the book aims to help organizations build a user expe- rience team and help you build a career in user experience. With guidance for both new UX researchers and people who have been in the field for some time, these essays will help you evaluate, improve, and present your skills. This book has been several years in the making, since each of the essays started life as an article on the Userfocus website. one benefit of this is that while writing the book we have been able to engage with other UX research- ers to discover what works, what is confusing and what content is missing from those earlier drafts. In a very real sense, the essays in this book have been through the same build-measure-learn cycle that we encourage design teams to follow. How to Think Like a UX Researcher In addition to re-writing the essays and curating them for this volume, we have added a section at the end of each essay titled, “Think Like a UX Researcher.” This section contains five questions and its aim is to encourage you to reflect on how you can apply the thoughts, issues and ideas in the essay to your current user experience role. Some of these thinking prompts contain an outline of a workshop topic that you can run with your team to help them become more user centered. As well as helping you reflect on the topic of the essay, you’ll also find these questions helpful in preparing for competency-based job interviews. What We Mean by “UX Research” Perhaps because user experience is a nascent field, different practitioners use different terms to describe the same thing. xii InTRoDUCTIon UX research is one of those terms. We are aware that some practitioners prefer the term user research, arguing that everyone on the development team is responsible for user experience, not just the UX researcher. Although we agree with the philosophy that user experience is everyone’s responsibility, we have still decided to use the term UX research through- out this book. User research implies a focus on users only; in contrast, UX research encourages practitioners and stakeholders to take a more strategic view and focus on what really matters: the user’s experience. This term also reflects the reality of the work: The best practitioners study users but they also research their users’ goals, their users’ environments and the business context of the product—indeed, anything that affects a user’s experience with a product or service. 1 1 Setting the Stage • 2 THInK LIKE A UX RESEARCHER The Seven Deadly Sins of UX Research Most companies would claim to design products and services that are simple to use. But when you ask customers to actually use these products and services, they often find them far from simple. Why is there a disconnect between what organi- zations think of as “simple” and what users actually experience? It’s fashionable to blame poor usability on firms not doing enough user research. on the face of it, this seems like the obvious cause of poor usability. If firms only did the research, they would realize their product was a dud. But, like most obvious reasons, it’s wrong. In reality, there’s never been a better time to be a purveyor of UX research tools. Every organization seems to want to “take the temperature” of their customers. Take a quick look in your email junk folder at the number of times you’ve been asked to complete a survey over the last month. If it’s like ours, it will number in the double digits. The problem isn’t with the quantity of UX research. It’s with the quality: organizations struggle to distinguish good UX research from bad UX research. Here are seven examples of poor UX research practice that we’ve come across in our work with clients—along with some ideas on how to fix them. • Credulity. • Dogmatism. • Bias. • obscurantism. • Laziness. • Vagueness. • Hubris. Credulity The dictionary defines credulity as a state of willingness to believe something without proper proof. The form this takes in UX research is asking users what they want (and believing the answer). A couple of months ago, David was attending a usability study on behalf of a client. He was there because the client thought that the usability tests
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