When I prepared for my first
anthropological field research in West Africa, I carefully planned and packed all
the stuff I was going to carry. My kit had to be portable, and it had to
include everything I really needed to do my work (and stay sane).
In the user
researcher’s portable kit of tools, there are a core set of items that let us
get the job done. These essential
articles pack very tight, because they’re made up of skills and attitudes. The following travel pack gives me the
confidence to get the job done in any setting – be it a conference room of
hostile contractors and distressed clients,
an animated gathering of a rural women’s agricultural cooperative, a
dimly-lit coffee shop for guerrilla usability testing, or a well-lit,
well-managed usability lab.
Attitudes
My take on
doing research in the digital realm is rather prosaic. User research is practical,
applied work, and its purpose is
to help with better
decision making. It takes the tools and methods of inquiry used
across scientific disciplines, and it uses them in a narrowly focused way, to make
products work better or help teams solve design problems. We are the ninja of research!
Knowledge
and Skills
As research
ninjas, we have to be adept and rigorous.
Our recommendations guide the work development teams do, and change how systems
are built. In other words, our work
matters, so it needs to be right.
The keys to
successful user research are strong planning, solid execution, and persuasive
presentation. A lot of specific
skills and areas of knowledge roll up under each of those headings.
Planning
For a start,
planning is guided by an understanding of the client’s context and issues (e.g.
unfindable content, low customer satisfaction scores). Expressing the research problem
is the first step in planning.
It is also
essential to articulate an overarching study goal or research question that guides
the whole endeavor. The study goal is often
confused with data collection questions, but they are not the same thing. An
example of a study goal is: “Discover the key barriers preventing users from
signing up for an online account.” On the other hand, questions aimed at
learning user demographics, what time of day users access a website, or how
people feel about a feature are data collection questions.
Execution
Good researchers
command of a range of research methods, have the skills to analyze
their findings, and have honed a talent for translating insights into
actionable recommendations.
Data
collection methods and sources are many, and include interviews, usability
testing, usage and feedback data, contextual inquiry, and much more. The tantalizing pitfall that many clients and
researchers fall into is to decide upon a method before identifying the problem
and the study goal. Do not select a method first!
Making sense
of research findings (and properly planning research in the first place)
requires a firm grip of statistics. This proven practice for collecting,
analyzing, and interpreting numerical data allows us to make inferences about
the whole based on observations of a representative sample. Sounds like user research in a nutshell.
Want your
research to sit on a shelf? Talk a lot,
but say nothing. If you just explain
your usability test and show your charts, you haven’t finished your work. Good
researchers deliver good ideas about solving the problem. It’s the whole reason for having done the
research in the first place.
Presentation
One of the
most important, under-taught skills of user research is the ability to create
and deliver a powerful presentation. Being
persuasive on paper and in person is key to delivering research value. Researchers must present their messages in
ways that speak to the needs, expectations, and attention spans of clients and
team. The skilled researcher leads the listener to make good decisions by
telling a clear story that threads together the problem, the study design, the
findings, and the actionable advice. A
persuasive presentation is also highly engaging – and short.
Packing
Up
In the context
of a user experience practice, research work has been, for me, a matter of
continually unpacking, improving upon, and repacking this core set of attitudes
and skills. Each piece of the kit can be
quite simple to acquire and apply, and yet I find the work in its parts and as
a whole boundlessly challenging and interesting. Making it ultimately quite satisfying, too,
is that it shares the aim of all good user experience design – to make parts of the world better, and
create personal value for other people.
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