ALA Nuggets: 3 articles on User Research
A List Apart advice about integrating consumer insight into a client-dev team workflow
I was a Market Research analyst for 6 years.
Some part of me will always be one. I just choose to focus more on User Research for product development.
But it is a tough, tough road evangelizing it and getting organizations to make time and allocate money for it.
Thankfully, A List Apart has a bit of advice for us.
- The Basic Guide: Interviewing Humans
It’s an excerpt from one of their books.
Good introduction to field research for design:
“Tell me about your job.
Walk me through a typical week in your life.
How often are you online?
What computers or devices do you use?
When do you use each of them?
Do you share any of them?
What do you typically do online?
What do you typically do on your days off?
How do you decide what to do?
Tell me about how your children use the internet.
How do you decide what to do on your days off with your kids?
What are your particular non-work interests? What do you read online besides the news?
How frequently do you visit museums in your town? Which ones?
What prompts you to go?”
2. On the importance of integrating various research sources: Seeing the Elephant: Defragmenting User Research
Each user research method has its own strengths and limitations. This teaches us the very practical lesson that a good UX team knows when and how to use them with each other.
3. The piece de resistance — integrating user experience research and findings across an entire organization: Connected UX
“Normally, when conducting a study, recruiting users for interviews was like fishing with a big net. We’d post something on Twitter, or maybe even use a recruiting tool to find users that meet our criteria. It can be very time consuming. But with a database of feedback with email addresses, recruiting was like spear fishing. We found just the right people to speak to within seconds.”
“Design researchers collaborated with the DesignLab to turn a months-long user study into a series of beautiful posters illustrating MailChimp’s customer archetypes. After a recent major redesign of the app, support and design research teams collected feedback from customers, printed it out, and tacked the notes underneath each persona poster—helping us triage issues from different customers and devise solutions quickly.”
