User Research Methods:Understanding the User

Summary

Understanding the users through effective user research methods is essential for creating successful products. In her lecture, Sarah Waterson delves into the fundamentals of user research, emphasizing the importance of moving beyond assumptions to gain real insights. She explores qualitative and quantitative research approaches, highlighting key methods like interviews, surveys, and focus groups. Sarah also discusses the significance of creating user personas and empathy maps to truly empathize with users during the design process. By employing these techniques, designers can build solutions that are intuitive, effective, and centered around the real needs and desires of their users.

Highlights

• User research is like detective work, uncovering what users really need 🧐
• It's not just about assumptions—get the real insights through proper research 🔍
• Discover two types of user research: qualitative and quantitative 🎓
• In user experience design, research is a foundational, ongoing process 🚀

Key Takeaways

• User research is essential in understanding and creating a product that truly resonates with users by uncovering their needs and frustrations 🤔
• Qualitative research helps dive deep into user behaviors and thoughts, while quantitative research provides broad market insights 📊
• Interviews, surveys, and focus groups are crucial techniques in the user research process to gather comprehensive user data 💬
• Persona creation and empathy mapping are powerful tools in capturing user feels and thoughts during design ✏️

Overview

User research is a crucial aspect of design that delves into understanding users' needs, behaviors, and motivations. It goes beyond assumptions by leveraging methods like interviews and surveys to gather authentic insights. Exploring both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, designers can empathize with users and create solutions that truly meet their needs.

The process of user research involves several steps, including defining goals, identifying target users, and selecting appropriate research methods. Working with techniques like user interviews and surveys helps to build a solid understanding of the users, informing the design process from the ground up. By identifying key user motivations and pain points, designers can develop user-centric solutions that address real-world challenges.

Developing user personas and engaging in empathy mapping are vital components in the research process. These tools capture the essence of user experiences, guiding designers in creating intuitive interactions that resonate with their audience's behaviors and expectations. Embracing a user-centered approach ensures that the final designs are not only functional but also desired by their intended audience.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:29: Introduction In the 'Introduction' chapter, the lecture focuses on the topic of user research methods. It covers the importance of conducting simple user research before starting a project and explains where user research fits within the design cycle. The content is essential for understanding how to write a user research report effectively.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Understanding User Research User research is crucial in the development of successful applications as it involves profoundly understanding the users, rather than relying on assumptions or guesses.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods This chapter focuses on the importance of understanding user needs and frustrations through qualitative and quantitative research methods. It emphasizes the need for researchers and designers to delve deeper than surface-level observations to uncover core issues and actual needs of students, particularly on how they study, in order to design effective solutions.
• 03:00 - 05:00: User Interviews and Surveys The chapter delves into the importance of user research in a student's educational journey, highlighting it as a systematic inquiry aimed at understanding user characteristics, behaviors, needs, motivations, and environments. The focus is particularly on user interactions with products, services, and systems.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Personas and Empathy Maps This chapter focuses on the foundational elements of User Experience (UX) Design, specifically personas and empathy maps. UX Design aims to create aesthetically pleasing and user-centered solutions that effectively address real-world problems. It's emphasized that UX Design is an iterative process, not a one-time task, and can range from addressing broad, global market trends to more focused design cycles.
• 07:00 - 09:30: User Research Report The chapter titled 'User Research Report' focuses on the significance of user research in the design process. It emphasizes the importance of gathering actionable insights to inform design decisions, particularly highlighting the study habits of first-year university students as an example. The text compares user research to detective work, where the goal is to collect clues and insights through various methods such as interviews, surveys, observation, and usability tests. The chapter aims to equip beginner designers with the necessary tools to conduct effective user research.
• 09:30 - 10:00: Conclusion The chapter titled 'Conclusion' emphasizes the importance of understanding the people you are designing for. The goal is to empathize with users and use insights gained to inspire and inform design decisions. User research is highlighted as a key element in ensuring that the final design is not only usable and useful, but also desired by the users it is meant for.

User Research Methods:Understanding the User Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 uh hello everyone today in the IDM lecture pod we will be covering the topic of user research methods and we'll go through how to conduct some simple user research before you begin your project and where user research sits in the design cycle um most of the content will be very important for you to get a handle on in order to write up your user research report court so without any
• 00:30 - 01:00 further Ado let's get into it user research methods understanding the user and conducting user research now why is user research so crucial um we would say that because at the heart of every successful app that you might think of there's a very profound understanding of the users um it's not about assumptions guesses or even common sense sometimes it's about
• 01:00 - 01:30 conducting some research to uncover what students really need what frustrates them what they desire and for us the main project for this semester how they actually study as designers and researchers um we do need to get a handle on how to conduct user research that goes beyond the surface to reveal some of the core issues and needs of your target users that that you're going to design isn't
• 01:30 - 02:00 just a tool but it will be a companion to your fellow students in their educational Journey so let's get going what is user research um it's the systemic systematic inquiry into understanding a user's characteristics their behaviors their needs their motivations their environment especially as it relates to how users interact with products services and systems
• 02:00 - 02:30 it's a foundational element in the field of user experience design or ux design as we called it uh guiding users to create solutions that are not only aesthetically pleasing but are also truly user centered and they're effective in solving real world problems in ux design it's it's not really just a one-off task it's an iterative process that continues throughout our design cycle and it can be as Broad and as glob broad AS Global mark market trends um or
• 02:30 - 03:00 it could be as specific as the study habits of first year University students but really the goal is to gather some actionable insights to drive the design process for the thing that you're designing um for beginner designers user research is a little bit like detective work it involves Gathering Clues and insights through various methods like inter interviews surveys observation and usability tests and we'll go through
• 03:00 - 03:30 those in a minute to build a comprehensive picture of the people that you're designing for the goal is really to empathize with your users and to use these insight to inform and Inspire the designed decisions and ultimately user research helps ensure that the end design will be both usable useful and desired um by the users that it's designed for okay let's look at where they it in
• 03:30 - 04:00 terms of the design thinking process we can see a basic diagram here from the Norman group we've got empathize Define id8 prototype test and Implement and we can see that there's two types of user research articulated here we can see user interviews which link up there to the empathize uh Circle um they're the exploratory research method to find out you know like a detective what you need to know to do your project and then you
• 04:00 - 04:30 can see in the sort of brown color there later when we test our prototypes after they're built that there's a usability testing so let's not get confused about those two things straight up so user testing happens at two points one is to kind of come up with the app or project idea and the second time is once we've made the thing we test to see if it actually works and satisfied the original brief that we we had
• 04:30 - 05:00 there's a whole heap of steps that we go through in between those two things but I thought it would be important for you understand that in terms of the design thinking process but you can see here empathize happens way before we even start with ideas so even though you've got the idea to create a student study app this semester um I know I mean I would do I could be guilty of this as well I might decide to just go off and think about all the ideas I could possibly have about what this study
• 05:00 - 05:30 helper app might be and what it needs without thinking about who the users are so we're going to be quite particular this semester in thinking about getting some user research methods for understanding or empathizing with our users before we Define what the app needs to be and then even before we start to ideate about possible solutions to the app we in a way these user interviews that we're going to talk about today
• 05:30 - 06:00 uh they form the basis and they're the sort of research for coming up with what the problem actually is so we're defining the problem by actually talking to people not just by guessing or looking at precedence so this empathized part is pretty important let's move on okay there's two approaches to uh user research there's qualitative and quantitative but inside those qualitative um research methods there's so many techniques um but let's
• 06:00 - 06:30 think about it there's two ones outlined here on this slide there's attitudinal where we listen to what users have to say and there's a behavioral way of doing user research where we look at what users actually do um we're going to focus a bit more on the attitudinal uh side of things for user research this semester where we actually try to listen deeply to what users say about studying
• 06:30 - 07:00 for example rather than necessarily observing them but we could be going down a behavioral pathway um so imagine you're creating an app to help students study qualitative meth methods may give you way too much uh material to get through whereas quantitative data might show you that 80% of your users prefer short study sessions over long ones so we do need to come up with some sort of balance about
• 07:00 - 07:30 whether it's qualitative or quantitative and I know that I've just talked about two qualitative let's not get confused um techniques up there the behavioral and that attitudinal um but there are quantitative U methods as well where we might survey 2,000 students and then try to distill some actionable results from that we trying to cover we might even do a study of one so really qualitative research is what we're doing in terms of
• 07:30 - 08:00 our user research this semester um a real world example of a quantitative uh method working I don't know du lingo might be an app that some of you have used it's a language learning app um they use AB testing where they show two different things which is a quantitative method to see which features to keep and which ones to either lose or work on further and they do that by um just measuring ing how long users
• 08:00 - 08:30 spend with particular features and then they're going okay well that's a useful feature we'll keep that when they're not using the feature for very long they then use a qualitative method after this quantitative kind of sort of working out the numbers they use a qualitative method using some user interviews to see what the emotional journey is for um their users on their app and then they will adjust the design accordingly okay so that's quantitative qualitative hopefully I haven't confused
• 08:30 - 09:00 you there quantitative is where you get lots and lots of data qualitative is when you delve very deeply into one aspect talking to a fewer users okay so how do we get started with user research how do students and we we can do it in a number of wave but to start the user research we really need to start with some clear goals um so we need to sort of think about about what the goals of the user
• 09:00 - 09:30 research are um so one goal might be what do you want to learn about the students who will use your app is it about their study habits is it about their pain points about study or maybe it's about features they think they would want to have in an app so there's many different goals that we could start with so they form the questions of what we're going to ask our users in this user research so once you've got your goals you'll develop some research questions that guide your studies for
• 09:30 - 10:00 instance and I've put two here on the slide how do students currently manage their study time or what challenges do students face when using digital study tools so there are two that we might guess at um and after after we've done that we'll need to determine who your users are it's pretty self-evident for us it'll be University students perhaps who are looking for an efficient way to review course material material or University
• 10:00 - 10:30 students who have two part-time jobs who find it hard to get organized so let's move on to the next part of this thing which is identifying who your users actually are and now we'll cover personas I think in week five but just a brief snapshot here once we've done some user identification we create detailed profiles of our typical users and these are known as personas these personas are fictional but they're really based on real data and sites from Young research they help
• 10:30 - 11:00 us keep the user in mind at every step of the design process so for our study app you might have a Persona like Olivia here who's a busy vizcom student who juggles part-time work and study or you might have Clark who's over there who's a computer science student who's still learning to manage his time effectively um so if we're to think of a real world example uh Spotify uses personas to tailor it's music
• 11:00 - 11:30 recommendations and it does that by trying to understand the different listening habits and preferences of user groups and they use that to aggregate a personalized experience for their users it makes it feel a little bit tailor made for them okay so personas are important I'm not going much into them today we will in week five but understand that it's really important to know who your target users are and then come up with some gen generic or fictitious personas that
• 11:30 - 12:00 standing for them Olivia and Clark are an example there okay so once we've got them and we've got the personas and this is the worldwi tour um we're going to think about doing some user interviews um user intervals interviews are where I know I guess the magic happens in qualitative research it's a conversation with a purpose and it's aimed at uncovering the why behind mind user behaviors and attitudes and
• 12:00 - 12:30 effective interviews are semi-structured they have a plan but they're flexible enough to allow for deeper deeper exploration of the users's thoughts and feelings which is what we're trying to get at so let's say for example you're interviewing students about H in order to find out how they study you might discover that through these conversations that although many students have tried digital study aids for example they of revert to paper
• 12:30 - 13:00 because they find it Les less distracting I don't know I might do that as well um so that's important to know a real world example of these user interviews might be Instagram's development of the stories feature which you might have seen if you use Instagram and it came from understanding through user interviews that people wanted to share moments without them staying on their profile forever and you know the stories disappear um so so they implemented that after knowing that was
• 13:00 - 13:30 a want or a desire on behalf of their users so hopefully you're getting an idea that these uh user surveys are kind of important next slide they're also so here we go surveying the surveys are one part of user research and they're pretty important to be able to design the survey in a way that it gives you the
• 13:30 - 14:00 answers that you need in order to develop your app idea um for instance if you're surveying an app surveying students before developing your study app you might include questions and I put them here describe recent challenges you faced while studying what do you think could have made it easier another one can you recall a time when you felt particularly successful in your studies what factors contributed to this success and
• 14:00 - 14:30 hopefully as we're going through there you're going oh actually it' be good to know these answers on a scale of 1 to five how would you rate your current study tools in terms of helping you stay organized why have you given them that rating so you can see the these are very qualitative um a questions which will give you qual quality answers or qualitative answers that will help you within your user research so gathering this sort of information is essential in as I said before into developing the scope open the direction that your app
• 14:30 - 15:00 design needs to take before you get into the ideation um okay so next let's see these surveys in context so here I've got a little Vin diagram and I know one of them's called surveys then let's not get confused all of them are survey techniques surveys interviews and focus groups are all techniques written surveys interviews and focus all techniques um which have strength and weaknesses for all parts of the user research process um they're all
• 15:00 - 15:30 effective techniques for getting a range of data from users um for your project I think written surveys are perhaps the most recognized form of a survey got it in their name um they're highly scalable and you can get a large number done really quickly and cost effectively if you're doing it out in the field it's really good for getting quantitative data um and it's because they're usually
• 15:30 - 16:00 Anonymous it tends to encourage sort of more honesty or more candid responses uh for getting the user sentiments captured um and you've probably all done a survey at some point in your life the student feedback on teaching or student feedb their types of surveys um but this semester we're going to C we're going to um concentrate a little bit more on interviews we can see here there in the in the sort of greeny color Circle there um conversational surveys
• 16:00 - 16:30 or interviews offer a more personal and a more in-depth method of data collection through one-on-one interactions you as a researcher can delve deeper into the user's thoughts and feelings and you would get more nuanced um understandings of their experiences and attitudes um when trying to understand complex behaviors or seeking out some detailed feedback on specific topics and for us it's about
• 16:30 - 17:00 how do you study um and then the third one that we're going to talk about inters in a minute but the focus groups the third one brings together and you've probably seen those these uh they bring together a small diverse group of users and they discuss their opinions about things um in a little group and it focus groups are like interviews but they allow um the people in the group to interact and you might get a richer response that way we may have a go at
• 17:00 - 17:30 doing a bit of a focus group in class as well but each of these methods outlined here the surveys interviews and FOC grps all part of a survey um need to be adapted to the specific needs of your research um for example in the predevelopment phase of this study app written surveys could be used to quickly gauge common challenges faced by the student base and then following that interviews could explore those challenges in Greater depth and then
• 17:30 - 18:00 focus groups could be employed to generate Creative Solutions um or to understand the context of student successes for example so they often used in tandem survey big picture stuff interviews very qualitative responses and very um nuanced information and then focus groups may be testing out those ideas but incorporating the these various forms of surveys gives you a very comprehensive understand understanding of your users and it's the Cornerstone
• 18:00 - 18:30 for creating a user centered study app that meets the need of your intended audience okay so user interviews which we just covered the second teal colored Circle are a qualitative me uh research method which I just said um but they're very very good at identifying user needs and
• 18:30 - 19:00 you can do this through open-ended questions um for instance we might uh learn that students struggle with maintaining concentration over long periods and need a fe a feature that encourages regular breaks so we would identify a need there saying they need to be able to concentrate so regular breaks might be an answer for that um we can use user inter interviews to understand user behaviors um so for
• 19:00 - 19:30 example an interview might unveil how students currently use tech technology for study what apps they're actually using what do they prefer and why and then we can use those insights to help us design an app that aligns with their existing behaviors making it more intuitive for them to use it so they're used to using something that does that sort of thing and so they'll have no problem in learning how to adopt to the to the new app that you think you're
• 19:30 - 20:00 thinking of number three exploring pain points um which is really just discussing the challenges that student face so if we discuss the challenge challenges that they have we can solve the real world um problems that they have so for example if maybe they express a frustration with organizing their study materials we might provide a very robust organizational system in the app itself or some way of structuring
• 20:00 - 20:30 their resources so that might be a useful way so what is painful for them I've always losing my files okay this app will help you structure your um your um files next one highlighting success stories if you're in when you're interviewing you could ask for some things that contributed to positive experiences in study and then you could take those into the app and go well I'll know now I know what is useful or what
• 20:30 - 21:00 works let's highlight some success stories in studying and put those in there and lastly Gathering user expectations so you might ask your users well what do you expect from a study app in terms of functionality what would you like to have what would the user interface need to have what would the experience need to be like what will be key creating some sort of app that meets or exceeds your expectations in this in this area area so that's another open-ended question that might come up
• 21:00 - 21:30 with quite a few Solutions um but from all of these five things you can probably guess that crafting some questions that are open-ended and being skilled at listening to the answers is really important in being able to get some useful research done um you do need to O ask questions that are open-ended enough that you actually get some quality responses or qualitative responses from
• 21:30 - 22:00 your user group um once you've conducted these interviews um and I think these five points are good to take a note of um you need to we need to then go oh we've got all of this stuff what are we going to do with it how can we analyze the data that we collect to identify patterns and key themes and these findings as you probably guess by now will directly inform the features the
• 22:00 - 22:30 design and the overall direction of your study app so with the insights gathered from these user interviews we can proceed with this user Centric uh design approach um further so let's look at that so post interview what are we going to do for study I'm just calling it study mate for the sake of it today once you've completed the interviews the next thing is these 10 steps and we may be a little bit light on on teps and you can see our
• 22:30 - 23:00 highlighted one there we transcribe all the documentation so you might record the uh open-ended interview questionnaires I'm going to suggest that we take notes as we go so there's not that terrible task of trying to work out what people said we might take a note down of answers to questions um so we'll document as we go next thing you would identify the key themes and you might go on what does she mean by that is there a recurring theme
• 23:00 - 23:30 like for example are students constantly frustrated with distractions or they're finding it hard to focus maintain Focus um uh could they maybe many of them mentioned a need for a feature that could help them manage their study time more effectively so the key themes are from your documentation are important kind of list down there creating user
• 23:30 - 24:00 personas um So based on the interview you could see earlier that we we might create a Persona like say for example for Alex who's a uni student juggling part-time work and studies and then Alex's Persona will represent all of those students who struggle with time management due to bit busy schedules so the user personas usually come as a result of uh the user interview here then we might develop empathy Maps we're going
• 24:00 - 24:30 to concentrate on that today and it will be something that you'll definitely need to put into your report we would create this thing called an empathy map for Alex our hypothetical Persona noting that he often feels overwhelmed and guilty for not dedicating enough time to studying and then he wishes for an app that can help him plan study sessions around his part-time job after that we construct user Journey maps and we'll do that as part of our ideation session um for example a journey map might
• 24:30 - 25:00 highlight opportunities for study mate our hypothetical app to intervene with timely reminders or motivational methods during messages during your study session not sure if I would like that but you could do that number six we would prioritize the findings that really means um just working out what the most important thing is that we've found and ordering them so for example might say the need for a focus Focus enhancing feature is marked as a high priority due
• 25:00 - 25:30 to its frequent mention and the strong emotional response um associated with the inability to focus next one Insight validation we send it and we're not going to do this but do know that in the real world you might get have to do this where we would send a summary of our findings to the people that we interviewed and say hey is this right and it will tell us whether we're on the right track uh Insight sharing uh where we
• 25:30 - 26:00 get we share what the insights are with a broader design team uh we won't necessarily be doing that this semester but no that would be part of what we did actionable design recommendation very important we definitely will do that um so it might be something as simple as saying we recommend developing a focus mode feature that includes a customizer I able timer to promote the Pomodoro
• 26:00 - 26:30 Technique allowing students like Alex to work in Focus BS bsts for example with scheduled breaks so what so we're sort of making a ingredient list up for our app so the actional design recommendations uh you know what we have to have our app do iterative feedback loops um is when we plan to make the Prototype and we would test it with users so can we can ignore iterative
• 26:30 - 27:00 feedback loops for the purposes of our user research but the most important thing I wanted to you to take from this list of 10 things was developing the empathy Maps which we're going to move on to surprisingly enough so what are they they sound complicated but they are definitely not um and it's something that I want you to include in your user research document an empathy map it's really just a visual representation of the add attitudes and behaviors of an individual user it captures and
• 27:00 - 27:30 represents their emotions and thoughts based on your re your interview data so traditionally empathy maps are used to explore the attitudes behaviors of one user but it's possible to create maps for multiple users or groups of users in the one map um so to create one it's very simple use fig Jam or a whiteboard or a piece of paper um get
• 27:30 - 28:00 your quadrants going which it's got the four there you can see says thinks does and feels um so for you look at your uh survey or interview results and you fill in the in the in the different quadrants so for example in the says Quon we might say something like uh Alex might have said something like I just can't find enough hours in the day to study effectively and you put
• 28:00 - 28:30 that in that quadrant in the thinks quadrant uh you you you kind of work out what the user is likely to think during their experiences so for Alex he might say oh I'm very concerned that I can't concentrate or I don't have time to do my study Etc so what what are they thinking about the task that you've asked them about just studying in this
• 28:30 - 29:00 case um uh in the does quadrant we want to think about the actions that the user takes so what what have you observed or what habits do you do you want to note there that they do what actions have they performed in in in the study process itself for example Alex might say that he skips meals to cram for assessment de deadlines or maybe he
• 29:00 - 29:30 constantly switches between tasks without completing any of them so what is the user in this case actually doing so what do they say can't concentrate I've got too many competing deadlines what are they thinking oh I don't have time for this there's not enough resources what are they doing they're skipping meals they're cramming um they don't complete anything because they're skipping in between tasks and then the last quadrant what do they feel and use this to c
• 29:30 - 30:00 capture or guess at the emotions you think that your user might be having so um it might be anxiety about un upcoming deadlines it might be overwhelmed by the volume of study material all of that sort of thing excuse me so after that let's move on we're going to move on so that's the
• 30:00 - 30:30 quick intro to the empathy map we will go through it again in class but what do you need to put into your user research report now let's just recap a little bit because we've gone through I've gone through a lot with you quite heavily we've done some interviews we might have done a written survey um we've mapped done a quick empathy map from our Persona that we've developed from that what do you need to put into this user research report um and it sounds more complicated than it is so please don't make it more
• 30:30 - 31:00 complicated but I'm asking for a title page uh an executive summary um in the ex title page that's obvious executive summary you're going to summarize the purpose of the empathy map and the key insights that you derive from it and it's sort of the key findings uh for the readers to understand you're going to um in the executive explain the context of the report um what's the challenge is so
• 31:00 - 31:30 it's to just to create a study helper app and the role of the empathy map in the process so how does it fit in what did you find out from it who is the Persona that you're you're developing uh the methodology section you're going to outline the methods that you use to collect the data so for us it'll be user interviews surveys and any secondary research that you might want to do um you're going to describe again the process of creating the empathy map
• 31:30 - 32:00 including how the T how you um you did it and the tools involved uh you're going to include a high resolution empathy map in there and you might want to explain what what happened in each quadrant then we're going to do the key findings which is obvious or maybe not too too obvious let me just get to that so the key findings might be a list of the key things that you found out about your users in relation to studying
• 32:00 - 32:30 behavior um there we go the user Persona profile just a brief one there insights and recommendations that's just a list of recommended Pathways to take as a result of doing these use this user research now you might go in your mind and I would too hey what's the difference between key findings and insights and recommendations key findings are just the findings that you have like uh Alex's time poor he's frustrated easily does not concentrate
• 32:30 - 33:00 has multiple deadlines etc etc and then the insights and recommendations would be your first start at the ideation uh component for your app which might be say oh we need some timer thing we need some file management thing or uh my main Insight is that people using this app uh need it to be able to do this this and this um it doesn't have to be everything at this stage it's just your key insights and recommendations based on this empathy
• 33:00 - 33:30 map that you've um been able to put together for your user research report a conclusion if you need one and then in the appendices just any interviews documents you might have you might have some written stuff and any notes that you had while you were doing it so all of the source materials for your user research go into the appendix there hopefully that's not too complicated we will go through it again in class so that's the user research
• 33:30 - 34:00 report okay so just to recap where we've been today and we've been a very quick way through user research report we could probably do it over the whole semester we trying to compress it as a bit of a token step this semester um but we can I'm ending with this diagram again we can see user interviews are part of the empathy component and you can see that the user empathy map will definitely make you think about how your users are feeling about different tasks
• 34:00 - 34:30 you're going to definitely empathize with their processes or methods for doing stuff stuff and how it does or doesn't work so we'll have this very clear idea about our users by the time we've um finished with this process so thanks for spending this time today um and I will see you class so thanks bye people