User Research
User Research Mastery Quiz
Test your knowledge on user research methodologies, principles, and practices with our comprehensive quiz designed for aspiring user researchers and professionals alike.
Challenge yourself with 27 questions covering:
- User-centered design
- Interview techniques
- Data analysis methods
- Evaluation types
- Prototyping approaches
When is Interviewing the best option for gathering data?
When there is a need for personalized answers/data
When you want a lot of quantitative answers
When you want to observe a behavior
When the group-dynamic can benefit your research
A interview has 4 different structures. Which is it?
Structured
Un-structured
Closed answers (yes, no)
Semi-structured
POBA
User-centered design rests on three basic principles. These are:
Early focus on requirements, prototyping, iterative development
Early focus on users, heuristic evaluation, iterative design
Early focus on users, empirical measurements, iterative design
User profiles are:
A detailed description of your users’ attributes such as job title or level of education that typically reflect a range. A user profile helps you understand who you are building your product for and will help you when recruiting for future user research activities
A detailed description of your users’ key interests in the product or service you are designing that is used to steer development. A user profile helps you understand who you are building your product for and will help you when recruiting for future user research activities.
A detailed description of your users’ attributes such as job title or age that typically identify them. A user profile will help you understand who you are building your product for and will help you when recruiting for future user research activities.
A persona is a fictional character created to describe usage patterns. It allows you to:
Represent a specific important user during design discussions and keep everyone focused on the same target. That’s why you develop a lot of different personas.
Represent a group of end users during design discussions and keep everyone focused on the same target. That’s why you develop a few different personas.
Represent a group of stakeholders during design discussions and keep everyone focused on the organization’s goals. That’s why you develop a few different personas.
What does universal design or inclusive design mean?
It means that your product or service enables everyone to access and use regardless of the device they are using.
It means that your product or service enables everyone to access and use regardless of one’s location.
It means that your product or service enables everyone to access and use regardless of one’s age, abilities, or status in life.
We discussed the difference between policies, guidelines, and laws. Policies are:
Set forth by a company or organization with the goal of ensuring that employees do not break laws. They also enforce good business practices.
Set forth by government organizations to ensure that all companies perform according to standards and follow good business practices.
Set forth by user researchers when they start out a research project to ensure that no one breaks laws and that users are treated ethically.
An informed consent form is an agreement of your ethical obligations to the participant of user research. It:
May not be legally binding, but it is absolutely ethically binding
May not be ethically binding, but it is absolutely legally binding.
May not be legally binding, but it is necessary for minors.
Anonymity and confidentiality are terms that people often conflate in user research.
Anonymity means that you are not sharing any personally identifying information about them with third parties. Confidentiality means instead that you require them not to share any product information they received during research with others.
Anonymity means that you are not storing any personally identifying information about them. Since you usually have at least their names and email, you typically keep instead their participation confidential, meaning you do not associate names or other personally identifiable information with their data.
Confidentiality means that you are not storing any personally identifying information about them without their consent. Since you usually have at least their names and email, you typically keep instead their participation completely anonymous and you do not associate names, email or other personally identifiable information with their data.
In order to properly assess what methods we will be using, it is common to ask for stakeholder input at the beginning of a research process. Stakeholder inquiries allows to thoroughly frame:
What are the organizational constraints in terms of time and budget for the user experience research phase
Who are the users we need to research during the user experience research phase
What do we want to know at the conclusion of the user experience research phase
Diary studies ask participants to capture information about their activities, habits, thoughts, or opinions as they go about their daily activities. Diaries allow a researcher to collect, in situ, longitudinal data from a large sample. Diaries are:
A behavioral method
An attitudinal method
Can be both
Focus groups are studies conducted with groups of users. They are best suited for:
Idea generation rather than formal evaluation and analysis. You cannot use focus groups to generalize the exact strength of users’ opinions.
Formal evaluation rather than idea generation, because the conversational nature of focus groups makes correctly registering and attributing ideas particularly difficult.
discovering problems, challenges, frustrations, likes, and dislikes among users. You can also use focus groups to generalize the exact strength of commonly held users’ opinions
Interviews can be conducted as unstructured, semi-structured, or structured, and are usually one-on-one activities.
Unstructured interviews are a qualitative method, the others a quantitative method
Semi-structured interviews offer the most flexibility when interviewing participants.
Structured interviews offer the right balance between open-ended and closed-ended questions.
Should participants in a user research study be allowed to withdraw?
Participants should feel free to withdraw from any activity without penalty at any point in the study.
Participants should feel free to withdraw from any activity without penalty at the beginning of the study.
Participants should feel free to withdraw from any activity with a penalty to compensate for any reward they might have been promised.
User research can produce qualitative or quantitative results.
Qualitative suggests data that has been correctly collected and that is significant, ie has quality. Quantitative suggests data that has been collected in large numbers without much attention to quality. Quantitative data, such as survey responses, can be made qualitative by further processing it.
Qualitative suggests data that include a rich verbal description, whereas quantitative suggests data that are numeric and measured. Qualitative data, such as open-ended interview responses, can be quantified.
Qualitative suggests data that include a rich verbal description, whereas quantitative suggests data that are numeric and measured. Qualitative data, such as open-ended interview responses, can never be quantified.
Interviews are an extremely common way to conduct user research. When using them we need to be aware that:
They are flexible and result easy for participants because of their conversational nature, but provide no opportunity to follow up on interesting or unexpected findings.
They are flexible and result easy for participants because of their conversational nature, but are prone to drawbacks such as memory bias and social desirability bias.
They are flexible and result easy for participants because of their conversational nature, but should not be used when exploring sensitive topics.
When using diaries, we need to be aware that people are busy and will be going about their lives while participating in the study. They will occasionally fail to enter useful information. We can mitigate this issue by:
Requiring more effort to participate, for example by better structuring the diary, so only those who are really motivated and hence more likely to enter information as requested will take part in the study.
Making our diary a multi-media effort, for example by using photos or videos, so that participants have more than one way to report facts. That way we can collect insights participants may have inadvertently or consciously left out in one medium by using another
Keeping our diary lightweight and then follow up with other types of studies to probe deeper or collect insights participants may have inadvertently or consciously left out.
Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) usually state that feedback provided during user research remains the property of the organization and not the individual participant’s. This is because:
Participants are protected through anonymity and confidentiality, so it would be extremely difficult from a legal standpoint to identify who actually provided such feedback without causing a huge work overhead for the organization.
You want to avoid participants later requesting financial compensation for an idea they provided in your study, regardless of whether that feedback really was the source of any product improvement.
You already reward participants and that is understood to be their compensation. Any further financial exchange would require the organization to file tax documentation and that is not usually done in user research.
When conducting surveys, we need to be aware of and avoid the possibility of selection bias. Selection bias and convenience sampling are connected.
Selection bias means that we are systematically including groups in our data sets through convenience sampling, recruiting participants based on our convenience.
Selection bias means that we are systematically excluding groups from our data sets because we do not adopt convenience sampling, which is a way to recruit based on the creation of a participants database
Selection bias means that we are systematically excluding groups from our data sets through convenience sampling, recruiting participants based on our convenience.
When using interviews, we normally transcribe conversations for further use at the end. Transcripts can be verbatim, edited, or summarized. Verbatim transcripts:
Capture what was done by both the interviewer and respondent but typically do not include misstatements as these are not considered to be important.
Capture a record of exactly what was done by both the interviewer and respondent including “ums,” “ahs,” and misstatements. For some types of analysis these word crutches are important.
Contain an edited and condensed version of the questions asked or topics raised by the interviewer along with the respondent’s comments in a structured, verbal manner.
When presenting results from surveys, it is important to:
Report all of the detailed analyses of your survey and create all the necessary charts for the data, as you might not know what can be important to your stakeholders.
Pick those findings and data points that support the results that offer the best business outcome.
Pick a few critical findings that tell a story and make them as visual as possible so you can see tham at a glance.
We have formative and summative evaluation.
Formative evaluation is conducted before product development. The goal is to influence design decisions before they are made. Summative evaluation is conducted once a product or service is released.
Summative evaluation is conducted during product development. The goal is to influence design decisions as they are being made. Formative evaluation is conducted once a product or service is complete
Formative evaluation is conducted during product development. The goal is to influence design decisions as they are being made. Summative evaluation is conducted once a product or service is complete.
Based on the answers you want you can choose which methods to analyze the data. When you want to determine the usability of something from a QUALITATIVE point of view, which methods should be used:
Observation of the behavior
Interview about first impressions/evaluation
Think aloud during execution of a task
The speed of task completion
Number of errors when executing a task
Speed and/or frequency of error recovery
Number of people being able to complete the task
Based on the answers you want you can choose which methods to analyze the data. When you want to determine the usability of something from a QUANTITATIVE point of view, which methods should be used:
Observation of a behavior
Interview about first impressions/evaulation
Think aloud during execution of a task
The speed of task completion
Number of errors when executing a task
Speed and/or frequency of error recovery
Number of people being able to complete a task
What matches with Lo-Fi prototyping? (Benefits and disadvantages)
Created quickly
Time consuming to make
Effective feedback for full product (icl. Design work)
Low cost
Hard to se the full product
Is interactive/"clickable"
Digital mockup or made of paper
Looks like the real application but doesn't work
Works and looks just like the real application
Shows basic functionality of the layout
What are the benefits of Heuristic evaluation?
A system of numbers were you estimate the degree of problems
A way to compare attitudes and behavior
Which questions to ask when reporting about the usability of a product
Clarifies the context of the user
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