Response to User Research
Response to user research
Design ethnography is the qualitative study of understanding user’s behaviors in their habitual environment so that the designers can gain a better understanding of the user’s needs and therefore able to design products that fit those needs better. To conduct a design ethnography, one needs to observe the users’ behaviors, gather useful information, analysis these evidence, and conclude a generic pattern.
The methods recommended can be generalized as “4Ds” — “Deep Dive”, “Daily Life”, “Data analysis”, and “Drama”. “Deep dive” means to know a certain number of users fairly well, so that you can truly understand the deep needs. “Daily life” means to stay off the user’s habitual environment. The information gathered from their true, daily life is the most insightful and useful information. And with those information, “data analysis” demands a systemic analysis of the information you gathered, so that you can conclude a pattern and gain a better understanding. With all the information and evidence gathered, “Drama” means to come up with a scenario where a persona use the product. “drama” enables the data gathered to be more lively and easy to understand.
Response to model and analysis
A user persona is a fictional character created by designers. It is composed from the evidence designers talked . It represents a generalized user type for the “user” in the concept of “user-centered design”. By having such a persona, designers can quickly use it to embody a behavioral pattern of the users and help make decision in the design process.
However, there is potential danger of using persona — the user type that is most useful for other areas, like marketing, is very unlikely the most useful user type for design. If you simply translate those user types into the design process, you will not be able to identify the true needs of the users. Coming up with a possible persona on your own is the same. If you didn’t actually gather information from real users but rather “think” this might be true, then you are just coming up a fictional character might or might not be relevant for design. Using these unreliable personas will cause unexpected results.
To avoid this possible downside, designers need to gather firsthand information of the users by actually interviewing real people and collaborate with team to identify patterns and create reliable personas. Design ethnography, for example, can be very helpful.
