I have a feeling I’ll be at this coffee shop all year doing homework for the first time in four years.

UX Learnings and questions from a formal class on human-computer interaction (HCI) and design

I recently started my first steps towards a formal education in UX research, design and development at UC Irvine (MHCID program). Although I have work experience in qualitative and now UX research, I had always wanted to build a solid foundation of knowledge and skills based in academia. I also wanted to widen my breadth of knowledge, not just in research, but to understand my fellow designers and developers’ priorities, goals and challenges.

The first class, an Overview of HCI & Design/Informatics, has me glad that I joined. Already I am learning so much (including un-learning and re-learning!) best practices and methodologies, challenging industry norms and my perceptions, and hearing about peers’ experiences.

The following is a 2-part list of personal learnings & questions, and best practices/tools/methodologies that seemed the most useful for me and my work. This list is by no means exhaustive, but is a good place to start doing your own research. References are included as links!

Part 1: Personal learnings & questions

• Be wise with your resources and don’t recreate the wheel! Before you get started on creating an entire research study to answer a question/achieve a goal, take the time to go through existing research (whether internally at your company or externally in the field). Invest in access to online academic research paper databases, and do a literature review before deciding to do the research.
• Research papers, even rigorous academic papers, are not foolproof. Learn to discern biases- who is the author? Who is the audience? What is the purpose of the paper? What’s the evidence backing up the findings? Can you verify the evidence? How long ago was the paper published- is it up to date? Did any third parties fund the research- could this potentially have influence on the research?
• When it comes to data analysis, you don’t have to do all of it even if you are the lead researcher. The analysis process is less effective if others who participated don’t also share their key perspectives and ideas. Your job as lead researcher is to synthesize, but it’s actually better for your report if you lean on others. Maybe they caught something you didn’t!
• Constraints, whether they are business, design or development constraints, are inevitable on the job. Learn to innovate with them, instead of complaining that they exist. You are not alone in working with constraints, so it’s no excuse to give up. Find the soft infrastructure that you CAN change within your organization.
• Sketching is powerful and should be encouraged for everyone in the team, not just designers. Sketching is an instantaneous prototype that conveys ideas, prompts questions and facilitates innovation in the product development process. Try sharing screen at your next meeting and using a FigJam or Miro board (or whatever) to start sketching out your ideas. Invite the others to collaborate on the sketches.
• Prioritize being inclusive in your research. As a researcher, you have the choice to include minorities in your participant pool — racial/ethnic, language, disabilities, etc. Make sure to build in minimum quotas in your screeners/recruitment process.
• Don’t take everything users say at face value. Users are really good at telling you what they’re doing and how they’re feeling in the moment (or how they want you to think they’re feeling.) They are NOT always good at predicting what they would use or would prefer.
• Don’t get stuck in the lab. Any amount of time you can spend out in the real world observing users using your product is valuable. There are important contextual insights you can get from the field that you cannot get from a lab-controlled study.
• Be aware of your and others’ bias in the research. You can never 100% get rid of your bias or others’ biases, but you can be aware of how your biases may affect your analysis of the research or the research itself. (i.e. ethnographies — you simply being ‘in situ’, or on site, inevitably changes the environment!)
• “Stories are only as good as the data you base them on.” — Dr. Stacy Branham
• The most powerful research tool is empathy. Insist product managers and developers observe research video recordings (choose clips to illustrate main findings and hold a watch party) as this is one of the low-effort ways to increase their empathy for the user. This also prevents non-researchers from taking user quotes, etc. out of context.
• Are you focusing on both usability metrics and the user experience of how the product may affect day to day scenarios and environments? In complex systems (common in healthcare and medical device industry), human factors usability engineering is still more of a focus than the holistic user experience.

Part 2: Current best practices/tools/methodologies (ordered by step in design and development process)

For deciding on a methodology…

IDEO Method Cards:

• 4 categories: Learn, Look, Ask, Try
• Learn — analyze info you’ve collected to identify patterns/insights
• Look — observe users to know what they do, instead of what they say they do
• Ask — get users to give direct input
• Try — try out the product/task for yourself

18F from US government:

• 5 categories: Discover, Decide, Make, Validate, Fundamentals
• Decide — Elaborate on research from your Discovery phase
• Make — Create a testable solution
• Validate — Test a design hypothesis
• Fundamentals — Foundation methods for practicing design research

Triangulation:

• Choose multiple methodologies to fully understand a design scenario
• Choose methodologies that account for each other’s weaknesses

For understanding how we perceive and process the world around us…

Norman’s Gulf of Execution & Evaluation:

• Gulf of execution — difference between what the user perceives they can do with a system and what system lets the user actually do
• Gulf of evaluation — difference between effort user has to put in to accurately assess the state of a system and

Gestalt Principles:

• How humans perceive objects and the environment
• Closure — we see the whole object even when the outline is only partial
• Common region —we group together items that are close in proximity to each other and believe they must have a relation to each other
• Figure/ground — we notice solid and stable items first (in the foreground)
• Proximity — we group together items that are close in proximity to each other

For ideation and collaboration with team members…

IDEO’s brainstorming rules:

• Be visual
• Don’t judge yet
• Encourage wild ideas
• Build on others’ ideas
• Go for quantity
• Stay focused on one convo at a time — no breakout convos
• Stay focused on the topic — problem statement/design mission should be visible all the time during the brainstorming session

Nominal group technique: another great brainstorming technique, especially if your team or org has a lot of outspoken people

• State an open-ended question
• Have each person spend several minutes in silence individually coming up with all possible ideas and jot those down
• Collect the ideas by having each person share an idea, only one at a time
• Record everything
• No criticism allowed! Questions are welcome, clarification is encouraged
• Give each person time to evaluate the ideas on their own silently
• Talk about the strengths and weaknesses of each idea
• Talk about feasibility of idea
• Understand — what’s the new task that this idea accomplishes? Is it better than the solution we already have?
• Sort ideas into piles: Good/okay/off table, High/medium/low priority, etc.
• Individually and anonymously vote for the best idea
• Tally and share the final vote count

Crazy 8:

• State a clear design problem or idea
• 1 minute timer per sketch allowed
• 8 sketches total for brainstorming redesign ideas

For design evaluation…

Dogfooding:

• Try out the product/task for yourself!
• ‘Eat your own dog food’ spirit to create empathy for the user

Log path analysis:

• Analyze logs of real user behavior (i.e. what pages were visited the most/least? Scrolling behavior, mouse movement? Typical paths taken?)
• While going through the data, ask questions such as, ‘What is the reason for dropoff?’ ‘Why did the user avoid this path?’ ‘What is the reason for repetitive scrolling behavior?’

A/B testing:

• Useful for testing the effect of very small changes in your design on metrics you are focused on (i.e. which design leads to greater sales, more time spent on your website, more account signups, etc.)

For creating empathy for the user…

Conceptual models vs. Mental models:

• Conceptual models — the designer/maker’s concept of how the system functions
• Mental models — the user’s beliefs and mindsets of themselves, others, products and systems, the environment around them

Storyboards:

• Demonstrate system interfaces and use contexts and helps increase empathy (shows the viewer why the user should care about the product)
• Use minimal detail! Remove unnecessary detail about human characters and background to control where viewer’s attention goes
• Optimal number of drawings: 2–6 panels

Personas:

• A tool based on real research insights, not ‘made up or imagined’
• Using real consumer quotes helps!
• Personas are never static — always a work in progress as that user type evolves in the real world

Journey maps:

• a good tool to convey the steps the user takes to accomplish a task, and where issues are in the workflow