RED UX Foundation: Conducting User Research [2/20]
[part 2/20 of a series of reflections on the UX Foundation course at RED Academy Toronto]
major points: [user research methods] [interviews] [surveys] [other research methods]
on user research methods
- we began with a group exercise on the features we expected a restaurant’s website to have (must-have, nice-to-have, don’t-have) and compared those to actual restaurants’ sites — i was kinda surprised how many people wanted clickable phone numbers; i’ve certainly never thought that i needed them.
- focusing on user needs vs user wants
on interviews
- it seems like interviews will give you some of the richest data if you know how to ask the right questions
- it’s interesting how there are so many factors in play when an interviewee answers something, between their own internal biases/culture/knowledge/etc and external factors — i’m wondering how you can go about getting the realest answers
- we were given time to begin preparing scripts for our surveys to use in our capstone projects — at this point, i only had a slight idea of what i wanted my project to be about, so i found it difficult to really get into the specifics
on surveys
- the guidelines we were shown on creating good surveys got me thinking; i’d never noticed before how much i appreciated it before when surveys would tell me how long they would take, and when i was given “i don’t know” options
- it seems like you would be looking for different information with surveys than with interviews; maybe more demographic data over becoming more deeply acquainted with particular users’ needs
on other research methods
- i’m very interested in contextual inquiry — getting real user behaviour seems like it would be very insightful and provide a lot of contextual information
- we took some time to do a bit of comparative research on products that solved similar problems to our capstone projects’ concept — very cool to see how wayfinding applications are used in different contexts, particularly in hospitals
