Crafting Research

Audiences come in many shapes and forms. From childhood, you were an audience during storytime. The storyteller wistfully crafted tales that captivated your mind and kept your attention. Singers and musicians keep their audience by playing to their emotions, their melodies and rhythms tugging at your soul. TV Hosts use wit and quips to keep their viewers engaged. Every audience is guided by content, it fills a need that the audience may or may not know they have. We can make assumptions about what someone may prefer based on our own experiences and opinions. Yet, what works for me may not work for you. This is why research is vital. Research brought us electricity, modern medicine, quantum computing… the list goes on.

So what does research have to do with design? Great design captivates its audience as well as the aforementioned ways I listed above. A badly designed product or service does not a happy user make. So the best way to ensure a design is going to please a user is to gather information on the user’s preferences. So by doing research, crafting surveys and conducting interviews you may gain insight to either confirm or debunk your own assumptions.

I’ve chosen to utilize Miro.com as well as Microsoft OneNote to organize my methodologies for user research for UX Design. I will be notating assumptions and forming both hypotheses and research questions based on these assumptions. I will then organize my research questions into different categories, ultimately having enough inquiries to start a screening process as well as a full-blown interview. I will then organize any media clips as well as backups of both OneNote and Miro presentations into my Google drive. I will also be sure to follow standard practices of handling sensitive user information in a secure manner, omitting anything in the screening that is not ultimately beneficial to the design.