User Research

There's no shortage of online content about user research. It's a huge field and there are whole 4-year programs dedicated just to teaching students about it. We're going to spend two days going over the basics. The goal is not to make you an expert - the goal is to teach you the most important things that will be enough for you to start conducting user research and interviews on your own.

The main goal of any research is to inform someone about a process. That still holds true for user research. Its main purpose is to inform the design process from the perspective of the end user. It's very important because it's this empathic research that helps to prevent you from designing for only one user (yourself). UX research has two big parts: gathering data and synthesizing that data in order to improve usability.

In tech, user research is usually divided into two categories: quantitative and qualitative.

• Quantitative research can answer questions like "how many people clicked here?" or "what percentage of users are able to find the call to action?" or given two version of the same website, which had the highest engagement. Quantitative research is important for understanding the “what” of what is happening and usually takes the form of surveys, A/B testing, and looking at performance analytics.
• Qualitative research can answer questions like "why didn't people see the call to action?" or "what else did people notice on the page?". This usually takes to form of interviews or conversations. It helps us understand the “why” of what is going on.

Research Methods

Types of Interviews

Directed interviews: a typical question/answer interview, where the researcher asks specific questions. It can be useful when conducting individual interviews with lots of interviewees because it follows a common script, it is also useful when you are looking to compare and contrast how different users use the product

Non-directed interviews: these are the best way to learn about touchier subjects where the users may be put off or find direct questions offensive. With a non-directed interview, the interviewer sets up some rough guidelines and opens up a free-flowing conversation with the interviewee. The interviewer will mostly listen during the "conversation," speaking only to prompt the user to provide more detail.

Ethnographic interviews: involve observing what people do as they go about their way in a natural way, without any external prompts. In this kind of interview, the user shows the interviewee how they accomplish certain tasks, essentially immersing the interviewer in their work. This can help you, the researcher, understand the gaps between what people actually do, and what they say they do. It can also shed light on things that users do when they are feeling the most comfortable.

Surveys and Questionnaires

Questionnaires and surveys are an easy way to gather a large amount of information about a group while spending minimal time interacting with each individual. These are a great research choice for projects that have a large and diverse group of users, or a group that is concerned with anonymity. As you've probably done in the past for a few of your classes, it's as easy as creating a survey, emailing it out, and then receiving responses.

For today, we want you to conduct your first user interview. Pick from one of the different interviews we discussed (Directed, Non-directed, Ethnographic), ask a friend of 20 minutes of their time, and run through an interview as if you were a UX designer for Spotify.

Your first interview (probably your first few) will feel very awkward and you may be struggling to come up with good questions to ask. That's exactly why we're practicing! The only way to become a better UX researcher is to run a few bad interviews and practice.

Once you run through an interview with a friend. Record a video of yourself talking about what you learned. This doesn't have to be fancy. Just download loom, talk to the camera, and then share the link with us.

Pretend that you are presenting to the CEO of Spotify about what you learned from your interview.