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Group #1 - The Essential Guide to User Research

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Group #1 - The Essential Guide to User Research

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User research - an essential part of the design process that shouldn't be overlooked by UX designers. Here's a guide for UX designers or those who simply want to understand user research better.

To understand how user research is done in a real context, check out the conversation I had with Mo on how he does research as a Product Designer.

1. Introduction

2. The importance of research

Including the user in the process

Empathy in user research

What happens if you don't do user research?

Stakeholder and team buy-in

What user research doesn't do

No 'one size fits all' approach

3. How to approach user research

Defining your research goal

Types of research methods

Organisational research

User research is used to understand the user's needs, behaviors, experience and motivations through various qualitative and quantitative methods to inform the process of solving for user's problems.

As Mike Kuniaysky puts it, user research is:

"The process of understanding the impact of design on an audience."

Image from Usability Geek

Great UX Design is grounded in great user research - driven by user insights while balancing priorities and technical feasibility.

User research helps uncover important and useful insights about the user and their needs. Until you know your user and their needs, emotions, feelings, struggles etc, you won't be able to deliver a great user experience.

' It all starts with the user.'

Image from Design Kit, IDEO.org

Including the user in the process

User research is a great opportunity to include the user in the design process. By collaborating with users, you are practicing user-centered design, which is crucial to creating a successful product for your users.

Image from Minitab

Researching with empathy in mind

It's no surprise that empathy is the key to user-centered design. Empathy means putting aside your own assumptions to see things from someone else's perspective.

In other words, empathy is the ability to understand another person's experiences and feelings from their point of view.

Why is this important to user research? By putting the user first, you can approach it from the angle of what the user needs to make their life much easier or simpler.

'You are not the user.'

The benefit of this is that it builds an emotional connection between the user and the product. Users feel their needs are being met and are more likely to continue using the product.

To ensure that you doing research with a user-centered approach, you can apply the Golden Circle model, as discussed by Thomas and McDonough in the Australasian Medical Journal by asking three important questions:

Why are we achieving a certain goal?

How are we going to achieve this goal?

What's the outcome of achieving this goal?

The Golden Circle

User research helps to remove bias by learning about the user from their perspective, experiences, knowledge and mental models. It examines and proves or disproves assumptions. If done right, user research is evidence that helps to ground design decisions based on an understanding of user needs.

What happens if you don't do user research?

A lot of the times, teams or organisations may bypass or rush the process of user research with reasons like, "We don't have the time or budget for user research" or, "We know enough about our users already to build the product".

While user research does require upfront time to plan and execute, and conducting it may mean the design process takes longer, neglecting user research may put the organisation at a disadvantage in the long run.

'Neglecting user research may put the organisation at a disadvantage in the long run.'

So what might be the price of not doing proper user research?

The product has great features that don't solve the user's problem

The product isn't user-friendly as false assumptions are baked into the form and function of the product

The product causes confusion for the user

Norman doors

Making your team and organization aware of the implications of not doing proper user research means that you will be saving time, money and effort in the long run and building a product that actually serves the needs of users.

Getting stakeholder and team buy-in

Great, you're doing user research for a project or product. While this step is paramount to great UX, unless the research insights and knowledge is shared with your team and stakeholders, no amount of research will be sufficient.

'Unless the research is shared with your team, no amount of research will be sufficient.'

It's important to include or engage your team in the research or it may be difficult to get stakeholder buy-in. You may be working with Product Managers, Data Scientists, Engineers, and other stakeholders. Within your team, there are different viewpoints and priorities.

Design is a team sport, so it's crucial to have your team understand why they are building a product and what problem they are solving before they jump into development.

Get your team and stakeholders involved in the research. Get your team members to take notes as you are conducting user interviews. Hold a workshop session with your team to analyse and sort through raw data from research. If that's not possible, engage your team by sharing your research findings with them.

By inviting your team and stakeholders to participate and play a part in the user research, you create a shared understanding of the user's needs, making it much easier to work towards the same goal, which is to create a solution that addresses the user's needs.

'By inviting your team to participate in the user research, you create a shared understanding of the user's needs'

When you get your team on your side, it makes the process of building a product together with a smoother one where there is less room for conflicts and misunderstandings further down the line. Chances are your team may start to advocate for the user as much as you do!

What user research doesn't do

The goal of user research is to take the knowledge and insights gained from users to create user-centered solutions.

While user research informs design, it doesn't immediately provide solutions to problems. There needs to be an exploration of ideas and design iterations before those solutions are reached.

There's no 'one size fits all' approach

When it comes to doing user research, there's 'no 'one size fits all' approach. It all depends on the specific user group and context you are solving for.

These are different for every project and it is your job as the designer to define and understand these for every project.

The first thing to do before doing any research is to ask the right research questions. What is your research goal? What are you trying to understand?

Here's a set of criteria to help you hone in on your research questions:

Be specific

Be focused and relevant to what you're trying to understand

Make them practical with the resources you have

Make them actionable

Be flexible and don't worry about which method to use (yet)

The types of research methods and when to use them

Research is multi-dimensional. There are so many different types of methods and approaches that it can be overwhelming if you don't focus your research. Here, I'll cover some important research methods and when you might use them:

Stages of the product life cycle

Quantitative vs. qualitative

Attitudinal vs. behavioral

Image from Nielsen Norman Group

Stages of the product life cycle

Discovery

During the early stages of the design process, the key goal is to do exploratory research. Each project has its own context and specific user group that research should explore. Questions to ask:

What do users need?

What is already working and what isn't?

Appropriate methods to be used at this stage include 1:1 user interviews, focus groups, competitive analysis, benchmark studies, ethnographic research.

Development

Now that you have developed your ideas and built wireframes and prototypes, you need to evaluate and validate whether your designs actually help users solve their problems.

Do users understand how it works?

How do users interact with your prototype?

Can users find what they are looking for?

Do the features look and feel right?

Methods to use include: moderated and unmoderated usability testing, prototype testing, card sorting, preference testing, A/B testing.

Live

As the design goes live, the goal is to measure how well the product meets user's needs. The goal here is to measure the performance and aim to optimise the experience.

At this stage, feedback from users is really useful. Things may have changed and the product you created to solve user's problems in the first place may no longer be the best solution anymore. The key is to proactively adapt and iterate if needed.

Methods include surveys, data analytics, bug reports.

In a nutshell, user research can be done at any stage of the product life cycle.

Quantitative

Quantitative research is used to understand the 'what'. This type of research can be measured numerically. For example, "How many people visited a store over a week" or "What percentage of users clicked this button". This type of research explores large sample sizes of data to identify trends and patterns.

Examples include surveys, analytics, and A/B testing.

What quantitative research doesn't tell you is why particular trends or patterns occur.

Qualitative

Qualitative research uncovers the 'why'. " Why do users have a particular attitude towards a product?" and "What else do people see on the page?"

Qualitative research explores user's attitudes, behaviors, and opinions. It provides key insights into understanding the context behind why trends and patterns arise.

Examples include user interviews, field studies, usability testing, and customer calls.

It's important to use a mixture of both quantitative and qualitative methods to come to a holistic understanding of the user and problems to be solved. Both methods are useful for answering different research questions and cannot substitute one for the other.

Attitudinal

Attitudinal research seeks to assess why users have particular attitudes and feelings towards an experience. For instance, whether users enjoy using your product or not.

Examples include: focus groups, card sorting, surveys, questionnaires and participatory design.

Behavioral

Behavioral research focuses on what users do with the product in question. This could be to find out how users navigate through a site.

Examples include A/B testing, eye-tracking, click-stream analysis and usability studies.

It's important to know that what users say and do are often different, which is why you should aim to do a mixture of attitudinal and behavioral research.

A note on organizational research

There's value in understanding the organization, stakeholders in the organization and the business context the product exists within before conducting user research.

Learn about the product and users through existing research your team has conducted. That way, you'll get a better idea of how to focus your research.

There's a huge overlap in the different types of research that can be done. Selecting which method(s) to use depends on the research questions you want to answer and the research goals you have.

User research is an integral part of UX design. When it's done right, user research contributes to great UX.

Remember, it's all about meeting the user's needs. As Hoa Loranger, Vice President of the Nielsen Norman Group says:

"UX without users isn't UX."

Thank you for reading! Hope this article has been insightful to you.

Check out the latest article I've written:

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User research - an essential part of the design process that shouldn't be overlooked by UX designers. Here's a guide for UX designers or those who simply want to understand user research better. To understand how user research is done in a real context, check out the conversation I had with Mo on how he does research as a Product Designer.

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Group 1: Quantitative Research vs Qualitative Research

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Group 1: Quantitative Research vs Qualitative Research

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Quantitative Research - Used to understand the 'what', of the research. It explores large data sizes to find trends and patterns. For example, surveys and analytics are types of quantitative research methods

Qualitative Research - Used to understand 'why'. It explores the users' attitudes, behaviours and opinions to understand the context on why trends and patterns occur. Example, why do people like this specific trend? Interviews, field studies and customer calls are types of qualitative research

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Def. User research is the process of understanding the impact of design for the audience using qualitative and quantitative methods.

Approach:
- be specific
- focused and relevant
- practical with existing resources
- actionablei tme
- flexible

Good UX is driven by user research and user insights. User-centred research, including users in the design process, creatives a successful product.

An empathetic approach helps designers anticipate user-needs.
- WHY are we achieving the goal
- HOW are we achieving this goal
- WHAT is the outcome of achieving this goal

Not conducting user research is disadvantageous in the long run as the product doesn't solve user's problem, the product is falsely assumed user-friendly, and the product is confusing for the user. There is never a one-size-fits-all approach to user-research.

Designing is a team effort and all research must be shared with stakeholders . Good user research can be used as leverage for stakeholder buy-in

Different stages of product life-cycle requires different methods of research.

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Methods:

Quantative - surveys and formal experience (A/B testing and tree testing)

qualitative- interviews and usability tests

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Group #3 - User Research: What is it and Why You Should Do It

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Group #3 - User Research: What is it and Why You Should Do It

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Why do user research?
1. Creating designs that are going to be relevant to your target audience. Create a sense of empathy with your users and build on that understanding with your research.
2. To create a design/interface that is easy to use. A design with alot of problems is not going to be used often if at all. It will make your work processes faster, safer and efficient.
3. It helps to understand that the effort in creating a good design through research will give you a good return on investment.Using analytics or A/B tests of different designs can help in this process.

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User research is an essential part of UX design. Unless we understand who we are designing for and why, how can we even know what to create or where to begin? Depending on your project, requirements and constraints, you can choose different types of research methods, from surveys and tests to interviews and the most common method - usability testing. Here, we'll look at what user research is, and the three most common reasons for doing user research - namely, to create designs that are truly relevant, to create designs that are easy and pleasurable to use, and to understand the return on investment of your user experience (UX) design.
What is User Research?

User research, or "design research," as it's sometimes called, covers a wide range of methods. It can mean anything from doing ethnographic interviews with your target group, to classical usability studies, to quantitative measurements of return on investment (ROI) on your user experience design. What all user research has in common is that it helps place people at the center of your design process and your products. You use user research to inspire your design, to evaluate your solutions, and to measure your impact. User research (and other kinds of research) is often divided into quantitative and qualitative methods.

Surveys and formal experiments such as A/B testing and tree testing are examples of quantitative research tools. Quantitative user research methods seek to measure user behavior in a way that can be quantified and used for statistical analysis.

Interviews and (to some degree) usability tests are examples of qualitative research tools. These are often more exploratory and seek to get an in-depth understanding of the experiences and everyday lives of individual users or user groups.

Each research method has benefits and drawbacks. As such, each can be used for achieving different goals. Which method you choose depends on what you want to achieve as well as a number of practical concerns, such as what type of project you are working on, your budget and your time constraints. With that in mind, let's look at some different reasons for why you should involve users in your design process.

Three Good Reasons for Doing User Research

" Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task."

- Tim Brown, CEO of the innovation and design firm IDEO

The type of user research you should do depends on your work process as well as your reason for doing user research in the first place. Here are three excellent reasons for doing user research:

1. To Create Designs That are Truly Relevant

If you understand your users, you can make designs that are relevant for them. If you don't have a clear understanding of your users, you have no way of knowing whether your design will be relevant. A design that is not relevant to its target audience will never be a success.

The first step and core of the design thinking process is to with your users. User research is one of the best ways to do that. Conducting different types of interviews and observing people in the contexts where they will use your design is a common method of doing this type of user research. We often place this type of research at the very beginning of a project to ensure that the overall direction for the project is relevant to potential customers and users. In order to ensure that your design continues to be relevant as your project progresses, validating your ideas with prospective users on a continuous basis is a vital habit to stick to. Talk to them about how they perceive your design and how they could imagine using it, or involve them directly in your design process, to ensure that you are still on the right track.

Let's look at an example: In 2005, Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung did a number of ethnographic user studies that completely changed the way it thought about designing TVs. Together with the innovation and strategy consultancy ReD Associates, Samsung representatives visited people in different countries to observe how they live and to talk to them about their homes and the TV's role in their homes. What they found surprised them. At the time, Samsung and most other TV manufacturers primarily designed their TVs with technical specs such as high-quality picture and sound in mind. The TVs were designed to show off their technical capabilities, but what Samsung found when visiting people was that they viewed a TV more like a piece of furniture. As a TV is turned off most of the time, people do not want it to dominate their living room. So, rather than show off their expensive TV with all its technological capabilities, they tried to hide it away as much as possible.

Following this insight, Samsung changed its design strategy radically, moving the inbuilt speakers to make the TV slimmer and creating a subtler, minimalistic design that would fit more seamlessly into people's living rooms. Technical capabilities were still important, but they had to be balanced with design choices that made the TVs fit into people's homes. "Home" was the watchword here, and Samsung got hard to work on the transformation. The challenge involved getting away from treating a living room like a showroom or sports bar, and going for "harmony" instead. By 2007, Samsung had doubled its share in the global TV market because it had proven to understand how to make its TVs relevant to its customers.

User research made Samsung change its TV design strategy to focus on making more minimalistic designs that fit into the customer's home. Although TVs have not become smaller, everything extraneous has been removed. As we see here, the TV functions as a gallery-sized moving picture - with all the "bells and whistles" discreetly housed - light-years away from the old notion of "peacocking" its technical prowess as if it were a James Bond gadget.

2. To Create Designs That are Easy and Pleasurable to Use

"If the user is having a problem, it's our problem."

- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers

All products should have a high level of usability (i.e., be easy to use), and usability tests can be a big help in achieving that. The days when programmed technology was a tool only to be used by experts are long gone. People expect products to be easy to learn and easy to use. They expect to pick them up and do things with them while only thinking about what they hope to achieve, not having to think about the products themselves. If your user experience is not good, chances are that people will move on to another product. Unless you work in a field with no competitors, a high level of usability (and a matching high-quality user experience) is essential in making any product a commercial success. Not to mention that your users will love you for creating a great user experience. Even if you are designing products for - e.g. - a highly specialized work environment where the users have no alternatives, products with a high level of usability will make work processes faster, safer and more efficient.

Wikiwand is a good example of a company that operates solely on providing a great user experience. Their product is a browser plugin which changes the design of Wikipedia articles to make them more appealing and user-friendly. Wikiwand does not provide different content from the classic Wikipedia webpage, but the company has thousands of users who praise it for the awesome user experience it delivers.

To the left is the classic Wikipedia interface; to the right is the Wikiwand version of the same article. The content is the same, but the experience is different.

When you are designing or developing a product, you become the primary expert on how to use it and what functionalities it has. Because you know your own product so well, however, you can become blind to functionality in your product that is difficult to use. As designers, we need that level of understanding of our products, but it also means that we can all too easily shift far away from the same perspective as our users. The author has personally participated in many projects where the designers know the ideas behind the interface and functionality of a product so well that separating the understandable from the not-so understandable is really difficult for them. This tendency of seeing things from the point of view of one's profession - what we call "déformation professionnelle" - and not stepping back to catch the reality of what's going on from a fresh, generalist angle is a natural one, incidentally.

Happily, though, you can avoid a lot of usability issues by following various guidelines and rules of thumb, but there will always be situations that the guidelines don't cover, or where different guidelines tell you different things. You might also be designing for a target group such as seniors or children where the regular guidelines do not apply. That means testing the user experience of your product is always a good idea. Usability tests work best when they are an integrated part of your work process so that you test your product iteratively and from an early stage of development onward. Early tests are what we can do on primitive prototypes - e.g., using paper; from there, we progress to more refined prototypes until we have something that resembles the final product. If you only start testing when you have an almost-finished product, you run a very serious risk in that your findings might come too late for you to make larger changes to the product. For instance, if all the software is done or if you can't push your release date, you'll have your back against the wall. So, stay fluid with your design until the very end of the process - it's amazing what insights can come from an eleventh-hour test of the 'last' version you have planned for rollout.

3. To Understand the Return on Investment of Your UX Design

Although the importance of good design has become widely recognized, UX designers and researchers still experience having to fight for resources to enable them to do their work. Executives and shareholders sometimes fail to see the value in investing in user research and UX design. UX design and user research is not as tangible as new features or fixing software bugs; so, overlooking their value can happen all the more easily. If resources become scarce, UX is also often one of the first areas to experience cuts; the reason is that consequences are not as immediately felt as when you save on development or similar areas. If you make cuts in say, software development, you can immediately see that the consequences involve cutting back on features or having buggy software; however, if you make cuts in UX, you don't experience the consequences until your product reaches your users, and when your competitors attract your users towards them.

We can easily argue for the value of great UX; it is much more effective if we can show it. This is where studies to show the return on investment (ROI) on UX efforts are worth their weight in gold (or the weight, at least, of the printouts). If you can show that the changes you made in the design generated more sales, resulted in a larger number of customers, or made work processes more efficient, you have a much stronger case for investing in UX. User studies to measure the effect of your design are mostly quantitative and can take different forms. You can do A/B tests during development that compare different versions of your design, or you can do studies after your product is released to measure differences in use patterns. With apps and webpages, you often build in different types of analytics to inform you of different user patterns.

The global online marketplace Etsy is a good example of a company that has built its success on a focus on customer experience throughout the entire customer journey and that continuously measures the user experience.

For example, Etsy routinely tests different versions of user interfaces to constantly improve the platform's usability as well as business metrics. Etsy's continued position as one of the largest online marketplaces is a result of its rigorous focus on usability, research and testing.

The world's most successful companies continually test and iterate their products, as is evident in their A/B tests. Here is one of several that GoodUI has been tracking. You can see more such "leaked" tests from AirBnb, Amazon, Booking, Netflix and others on their website.

The Take Away

Here, we have shown three good reasons for doing user research and we have touched on when in your design process you can integrate user research. Here are the three reasons again:

Do user research to ensure that you create products that are truly relevant to your target group.

Do user research to ensure that your products deliver a great user experience.

Do user research to show the ROI of your design efforts.

You can - and should - do user studies at all stages of the design process. You do studies before you start designing so as to get an understanding of what your target group needs; you carry out iterative tests during development to ensure that the user experience is on track, and you can measure the effect of your design after your product is released. This "holy trinity" approach can keep you three steps ahead as every dimension of your release will have been considered, analyzed, and tested before you sit down to see the results of the ultimate test (the ROI), more confident that you've got a winning design.

References and Where to Learn More

For an in-depth coverage of different user research methods, take the following courses:
User Research - Methods and Best Practices Data-Driven Design: Quantitative Research for UX
In this interview, founder of Wikiwand, Lior Grossman explains the company's approach to designing a more usable encyclopedia.

Images

© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

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User Research: What It Is and Why You Should Do It

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Dive into what user research actually is, and get an overview of how you can use user research in your design process by exploring the 3 most common reasons.

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Group #2 - You Won't Believe What They Said...

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Group #2 - You Won't Believe What They Said...

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This article presents user research tips and explanations from a UX designer at Whitesmith Co. Here is a brief summary of the article:

There is no way to follow user-centered design without talking to your users.

There are hundreds of different methods to user research, you do not need to use them all on a single project.

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whitesmith.co ® 2021. All Rights Reserved

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"You won't believe what they said..." [A UX Research Case Study] | Whitesmith

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Every couple of days there is a new blog post saying "Listen to your users" or "Don't listen to your users" (wait... what?); however, regardless of their conclusion, there is no way to follow a User-Centered Design without talking to your users... a lot...

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User research is the information gathered (and methods used to gather that information) from the users of your product for the purpose of using said information to make improvements to your product.

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Who are your users?
-Knowing nothing about your target user means you do not understand their fears, goals, and frustrations. Conducting an interview will allow for a smoother experience.
-When recruiting users for research, it's best to get existing users (or possible users) of the product. This is because they have more context, and are closer to your target demographic.

The interview script
-When making an interview script, avoid yes/no questions, as it is important to listen carefully on what the user is saying. Always have the user explain their thought process.

-Having a second person in the interview is helpful, as one can guide the user through the process, while the other takes notes.
-"it only takes 5 users to discover 85% of issues, 15 can discover all of them"

Now What?
-Separate a summary into three sections (Pains, Gains, General Notes)

Pains: Dissatisfactions, tensions, apprehensions

Gains: Requirements, wants,  and expectations

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1. Not having time is no excuse...coming up with something basic to do some user research among staff or family can yield very usable results.
2. Research methods can be tailored and designed to make the user research process more appealing to designers.
3. Even if you think you know a lot about the users of your product, user research can help validate your idea and open you to new ones.
4. Open-ended questions get people to tell you about what they really want/need, rather than trying to get them to approve of your ideas.
5. Stories from users can give just as much valuable feedback as hard data and facts.
6. Observations are things you see, whereas insights are connecting the observations to identify real needs and new ideas.
7. It is important to apply your imagination/intuition to predict the latent, unstated need of the users you're researching.

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7 Common reactions:

1. “We don’t have time for it in this sprint. Let’s do it later ”

No Time is no excuse, even a little user research is better than none at all.

2. “Research is boring. Design is more fun.”

*Discover
*Define
*Refine
*Execute
*Analyse
*Transform

3. “We already know so much. What do we need research for ?”

You and your team know so much? Be aware of your own biases. Use User Research to Validate what you already know.

4. “We should also ask users about our new features during the interview. ”

Don't! feed back is great but focus on what the Users want to tell you and their observations rather than getting them to approve or disapprove of your product.

5. “Do we have enough data to support this ?”

Use data for iteration, use stories for inspiration.

A story can help reinforce why we need to rework a site to help the Users.

6. “We got lots of insights from the usability study ”

7. “How did you infer this ? We spoke to just 5 users”
__________________________

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7 common reactions you will hear and how to tackle them by taking a practical research approach.

Waiting area inside a major hospital in India. Imagine making a digital solution for this space without ever being here !

If your job title has anything to do with design, there is a good chance that you would have experienced the need to do some form of user research as part of your creative process. And if you happen to work with or for a group of people who have limited understanding of the design process, then I am pretty sure you must have had your moments of frustration.

If it is a battle to sell design , it is a war to sell research.

For last 8 years I have fought s ome wars on my own and by the looks of it there are more to come. From a job title saying 'Design researcher' to 'UX designer', from a corporate to a start up to a design agency to freelance and finally a corporate again, I have experienced different levels of design maturity within the teams. But to a large extent the challenges are similar in each one of these setups. If you are lucky, you might be part of a dedicated research team or at least have access to one. Even then it's not always a smooth road taking your research to far corners of your company and making an impact with it. It's partly our fault as well when we also fail to understand our 'other users' , namely POs , developers and everyone else who should listen to what you have to say, but not are not entirely abreast with fancy jargons of our design world :). What I have realised over the years is that sometimes we have to let go of our (designer)ego and bend some rules for the benefit of end user.

I have summarised some common reactions I have heard over years from my non designer colleagues(and sometime fellow designers as well) and my learnings from my successful and unsuccessful attempts to initiate or utilise user research in my teams. Each learning is accompanied with a real life project example (marked as 👉).

You will not always have the liberty of time. So be smart with what you want to do. If people don't buy your argument or are indifferent to it, just do it anyway. Be street smart (literally). Catch users you can find on your office floor, cafe , front desk etc. I personally find it awkward to venture down to public places for research, but if you have the talent then go for it.

Make research inherent part of your process and if need be make it discreet.

Don't worry much about the number of users you get. Some research is better than no research. You can do research also just to validate your hunches as a designer.
👉 Designing a tool to make people aware of importance of having sufficient buffer savings
I was given this task to redesign the existing tool at ING which calculates how much buffer savings a user should have, based on the personal situation. The current tool had a high drop out rate and very low conversion to start a new saving goal or open a new savings account.

To speed up the process I went through the existing flow with team members to see where the current experience lacks. Then we made a quick design to use as an artefact during research and tested it out with office front desk and cafeteria staff. In total we spoke to just 5 users for 40 mins each, but it already gave me plenty to work with. It was not just a usability test but a way to gather insights using designs as a medium of conversation. It was easy to ridicule or praise the screens and then talk about the deeper reasoning behind their choices. A sample outcome from this quick research :

Everyone had a ball park amount in their head. What we were showing was mostly way more than their expectation . This was putting them off and they wouldn't believe that they need this much buffer. It's too big a hurdle to take any action.

Some more insights like these were good enough for me to come up with a new design for this tool and it eventually led us into a more strategic discussions on how to make such tools more contextual and relevant.

This one is for my fellow designers who believe that the divine act of creation is what makes us unique and is way more interesting :).

Research can be as creative as the real design process.

You can always 'design a research' like you design products. Keep things flexible to make it more fun. A typical research process can also have 4-6 phases like a typical design process:

Discover : What are the right goals and questions to research on ? Know what you don't know

Define: How are you going to do the research ? Who will you research with ? Will you just talk or show some designs or use some artefacts to stimulate conversation. It is where you can go creative by thinking of new ways of stimulating responses.

Refine : Test your research with family / friends / colleagues. See if you are getting the desired quality and quantity of results and iterate.

Execute: Do the research, also starting with a few users and refining if necessary before doing it with the rest of them.

Analyse : This might be the most important step if you have a lot of data to process, but if are doing a small scale study, you might already have your wow moments in the last step.

Transform : This is where the real magic start to happen, when your wow moments start materialising into tangible ideas / design recommendations.

👉 Laptop innovation for Indian context.

One of my very first assignments at Samsung was to investigate laptop usage in Indian context and suggest new innovation opportunities. We went through all cycles of research as mentioned above, interviewing over 35 users from different segments across 4 cities in India and conducing multiple expert discussions. Some snippets from the research process :

Define: We designed different research methods for different target groups. To capture the desires of young students we designed a fun 'Design your laptop' exercise, where a group was given props to assemble their laptop of dreams and present it to rest of the students. For families, we went for the traditional in context ethnographic study. A family laptop in India is a shared commodity and used more like a desktop pc. It was imperative to see the environment in which laptop was kept and used.

Analyse: Each research insight was used for brainstorming ideas ranging from product design concepts to new service solutions. Focus was to come up with innovative ideas to tackle very peculiar Indian needs.

Before starting the research make a brain dump. There is already a lot you and your team members know.

Realistically , it's impossible to stay unbiased during a research.

It's better to know your biases before hand and form proper hypothesis from them. This will ensure you research outcomes are of better quality. It's also important to manage expectations of stakeholders. Don't promise hefty outcomes from your research. If your team thinks they already have a good understanding of users from their own experiences, still use research as a means to validate them. Also, do a detailed desktop research to add to brain dump. Collect as much data as possible from both internal and external sources to kick off a topic. You will be surprised how much data you will find in your own backyard. It's highly likely in a corporate setup that some team somewhere has already worked in past on something similar.

👉 Design of new account aggregation features complying to new PSD2 directives

It was primarily a technical project at ING, where my squad (old school team) was exploring how a new legal framework PSD2 can be implemented. I was part of the group which has been working in the domain of daily money management for years. They had a lot of product and online user behaviour knowledge, but they have been part of very few real customer conversations. When I joined the project to flush out some first screens (YES, it still happens in 2018 !), I wanted to align the team members on where do we stand right now and what aspects of consumer behaviour we don't fully understand.

We used one of the standard persona used within the company to make a day in life scenario and plotted all our insights, questions, ideas and hypothesis on it in a half day workshop.

This made the team to realise that there is still some value in talking to customers to further understand their daily money management behaviours and how aggregation can provide more value.

Make a short list of goals you want to achieve from your interviews. Your team might be tempted to make most of the opportunity they get to talk to user and they might ask you to get a stamp of approval from the user on the ideas they want to implement. Keep your interviews simple and focused on listening to user first, rather than forcing them to say what you want to hear.

Treat your interviews like an free flowing informal conversation. Asking for opinions usually result in fake and sugar coated answers.

Also if your conversation is more open, it will be difficult for others to misuse research. It might happen that a user 'yes' or 'no' is etched on stone without giving a thought to the reason is communicated as a gospel of truth within the organisation. In that case, research might do more harm than good. If your conversation is going well and is engaging enough, you will know if your features are going in right direction.

👉 Conversational UX research

At ING we were exploring how we can engage with our users better using conversational interaction, mainly chat bots. This was a side project (the so called 20 % project) for us and we had to deliver something tangible in real quick time. Since this topic was new and vague (and still is), we had to start with user research with a focus on certain user segments and strategic directions. We also had a lot of ideas already which we wanted to test, but still to keep the study open and lean, we as a team grouped all that we wanted to understand into 5 main clusters. This helped us to keep a clear focus on what we want to achieve in each user research session without biasing the users to judge our ideas.

Use data for iteration, use stories for inspiration.

In companies, especially in agile team setups, we don't focus enough on stories (not to be confused by the 'scrum user story'). This is one area where you as a designer can add value. Most of your stakeholders will anticipate black and white answers from research, user's likes and dislikes, usability issues and other traditional measurable metrics.

A good user research should also bring out stories which reflect something profound about users and could act as an inspiration for you and your team to think big about your product.

Use data to make feature level decisions and refinement of products. Story can be anything from a quote, an interesting tale of events or merely a powerful image of user or the product environment .

👉 Research for a diabetes management app

I was consulting with a startup working on a diabetes management app for Indian consumers . I was roped in to help the team revamp their consumer mobile app. The product had a vision from it's co-founders and a wish list of features. But no one had ever spoken to the end user i.e a diabetes patient, to understand if all these features even fit their needs, wishes and behaviours and if they were missing something in the big picture. I did start flushing out screens, but constantly asking questions on the validity of the ideas itself, which eventually led them to believe that we really miss user stories and deep emotional understanding of this topic. I went out to talk with users with the co-founder of the company which helped him hear these stories first hand. Some stories which inspired the team :

Story 1: "If I talk about my sister and other family member then they felt that it should not have happened at this age. It is still ok to have it after 50 or 60 but not at this age of 36-42. Our own people feel sad. So the way people look at you, think about you and eat around you changes"

When someone is diagnosed with diabetes, it impacts the whole family. In India families are very tightly knit and everyone gets impacted because of one diabetic in the house. From food habits to daily routines, everything tend to change. But this also means that you are never alone in your fight against diabetes and your partner or kids are always there to support, remind and if needed police you to keep you away from harmful habits. This led the team to think of diabetes care as a family activity and not just an individual's own responsibility. A new companion app was designed to help family members track the vitals and poke for medication etc. We also strongly believed this could be a more effective way of behaviour change, where we were facing in some cases decade old habits which could prove deadly for a serious diabetic patient.

Story 2: "I don't want to create an issue of my diabetes in front of people in a social gathering. I will eat whatever is there to eat. "

People in India are not always very open about their condition. In the pressure of negative social reaction or any judgement, people stay to remain muted about their issues. The users of this app needed a space where they can talk about their condition and it's hardships freely. The feeling that I am not alone, helps user psychologically. T his inspired us to have a concept of community on the platform moderated by a diabetes coach or a doctor to give advise and let users exchange information and ideas on how to tackle this disease, without any inhibition.

An observation is what you see or listen and insight is what you make out of it.

The term Insight is used very loosely now a days in context of research outcomes. In my experience the first (and the easiest) research outcome is an observation, which is usually(and wrongly) shared or presented as an insight. If there is time pressure or the researcher does not dig deeper, the research outcome could lead to obvious results, hence undermining the process itself. In a 6-8 user research , if you get 5-10 'real insights' you did really well. Don't try to fill up 20 pages with insights, because they are not insights but merely observations.

If it's too obvious it's not an insight.

Not that the observations are not important. These really help in setting up the context and will make your story more interesting. In some cases these observations are important to define immediate product improvements. But a good insight will immediately tickle a lot of near and long term ideas and it will be something which will have the potential to drive a whole new product vision.

👉 Investment return calculator

ING wanted to present investment as an alternative to customers who have their money stashed in saving accounts, which for last few years gave almost no returns. The feedback was not very promising and conversion to real investment accounts opened was quite dismal.

During the research, we saw some obvious usability issues with current tool, but there were few insights which helped us understand the real barrier which users face before taking a jump to invest. Example of how an observation could lead to an insight

Observation 1 : Users want to understand the logic behind the return on investment shown in the calculator.

Observation 2 : Users want to play around with input, but are not sure of what to fill in in the fields like risk, duration of investment.

Observation 3 : Almost no one checks out the details of investment product or intent to call the advisor to discuss more after doing the calculation. (This was unfortunately taken up by the team as a usability problem, but there was a deeper reason not to click on these buttons. This misinterpretation of user tests deserve a separate article)

From these 3 observations , we deduce the following insight.

Handhold users, slowly till they are ready to invest : Users lack the knowledge and confidence to start with investment. They need time and plenty of guidance to understand the topic and make right choices.

Insights like these helped the team to try out a radically new design and rethink the whole idea of how we have been building such calculators.

It was not just about making the call to action more visible, but motivating users enough to find the button and click it.

Although, we are still working on this problem, as it's a deep behavioural bias against investment, but as a team we have a fresh approach to solve this problem, which is deeply rooted in the user understanding.

Insights will always have an element of your imagination. Don't be afraid to extrapolate stories to predict the latent needs.

Avoid generalisations but, be brave with predictions.

With qualitative data, it's hard to say anything with complete conviction. Use your designer's hunch to derive insights from common patterns or data. There will always be someone who will question the source of truth and how did you conclude a particular insight. User stories come handy in this case. Reiterate the focus of your research is to sense latent user needs and not to create a matrix of user's likes and dislikes.

👉 Investment calculator (again)

If you have read the example from the previous point ( if not, please do), you might think how was this insight derived. Is there a clear logical deduction from the observations. Answer is NO. But that was my interpretation of the facts. The insight touches upon basic human traits like we are risk averse and scared of change. If you can get some quantitative data to back your insights or some proven scientific findings to support your interpretation, use it further make your case stronger. But again I had only 2-3 insights of this kind. If I would have tried too hard to churn up new insights the result would have been less convincing. Also, these insights were meant for a certain group of users. Not everyone is scared of investment. So choose your target group / persona as well before doing research and deriving insights from it.

I hope this can help my fellow designers / researchers in their routine work. I am very curious to hear more success/failure stories and how can we further improve the knowledge and acceptability of user research within organisations.

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If your job title has anything to do with design, there is a good chance that you would have experienced the need to do some form of user research as part of your creative process.