How to be Research-Ready for your next User Experience project
As we all know, User Experience comprises of multiple stages starting from Strategy to Evaluation in an iterative process until its completely ready for Launch. Research is a key stage post strategy mainly performed by a UX researcher. His job is to observe/ gather quantitative & qualitative data of users behaviors, needs, motivations & provide insights to your product team. It basically deals with removing assumptions & gathering impactful data.
A great analogy would be the construction company in search of its next plot to build a shopping complex. As per its proposed location requirement, it conducts market research, rent & purchase model, consumer behavior, competitive shopping markets, risk management issues etc. This helps the owners eliminate any uncertainties, build the structure, work on interiors & invite brands.
UX research comprises of numerous methods - User Interviews, Card Sorting, Questionnaires, Surveys, Contextual Inquiries, Usability Testing etc. These methods done well would satisfy the Research’s purpose. Though we have to follow a Research-Ready checklist. These items would bring us in complete UX sanctity.
They are:
#1 Principles without evidence
Generally, every company has a design system/ language in place be it material, flat UI or skeuomorphism. Companies having a thoroughly researched design for multiple form factors could be a good sign of its belief system but the problem starts when there is a lack of analysis, design implementation & iterations.
During my career, I remember having faced a specific instance on a Form design. Post the design phase as our developers start working on their HTML structure, a general recommendation would be to avoid scroll as much as possible. The manager's suggestion would be to decrease field heights, margins & re-work on font sizes. Their intention is to have as much content in one view as possible. This good intention would slowly become a bad principle which is applied to every design irrespective of the independent design requirements.
These principles are generally passed through the top-level management failing to understand that design is objectivity with subjective use cases.
#2 Never ask people what they like
This is a common case in user interviews & stakeholder review meetings. Designers are asked to prepare 3-4 designs which are directly presented to a User. They are asked to nominate their "liked" designs. I’m specifically emphasizing the liked word casually thrown at the users. The problem is that users aren’t capable enough to point out the reasons for their "liked" designs & even if they do so, it would not be backed by any rationale. This would hence prove that the UX designers aren’t clear of their own set goals.
People generally do not know what could be a good product until they use them.
#3 Keep Bias Aside
Many companies tend to work on fixed domains for ex: BFSI which tend to be their safe zones. So the projects are in line of those domains having their own set of compliances. These projects fall in the lap of the UX designer/ researcher who works on similar enterprise apps/ projects for years ultimately limiting their thought process. They think that the current process has been successful in past projects & will work on the future ones too. This bias in conjunction with laziness is very harmful as it ignores the changes in multiple form factors, technological changes, domain change & the ever decreasing human attention span. It would be a lot better if designers & researchers enter a new project with a blank-slate mindset.
#4 Avoid Vagueness
The UX designers/ researchers have a tuff job to study markets, interview their users & evaluate data. They will require a good sense of user behavior, domain knowledge & psychology fundamentals. Now the problem is they approach the users in conjunction with their clarity of the product & what it aims to achieve. This clarity would break down the needs, pain points, motivations & define the future analysis.
Here is an example in the context of user interviews. We should generally start with broader theme questions & narrow down to specific questions. Let's say we build a chat app -
Theme question - Why do people chat online?
Specific question - Do you chat more or send smilies/ stickers?
This data would be further broken down with follow-up questions which help us digging deep into the root problem.
#5 Pride down
You, the UX designer is the one who is the bridge & the captain. You are supposed to connect the stakeholders with the users at a deeper level & steer your ship to a growth-based path. All these processes require you to spend max. time interacting with people where you have to extract concrete information & the problem is people aren't willing to share or might share misleading/ limited information. We have to learn to connect with the users with a high level of empathy so we don't come over as the Sales guy. The empathy would drive users to be more open comfortable enough to share content which would help implement our design decisions.
To sum up, the points mentioned would help prepare you for a new project with a clarity on How you should start the process. It wouldn’t matter if we keep gathering information, design beautiful personas & prototypes if our research is not thought through.
I would like to end with this final thought.
"Quantitative data shows the WHAT of insights while qualitative gives you the WHY"
