The universal nature of user research artifacts
When I started my professional journey as a user researcher, I began working with a traditional research agency where I was essentially working on advertising research, testing creative concepts and ideas before they could be actually converted into go-to marketing campaigns. My stakeholders included the client (mostly the brand manager or product manager in a CPG, automobile, healthcare, e-commerce scenario), creative guys (designers, copywriters or anyone involved in creating the concept) and media guys (media planners, buyers and content marketers who would decide on which all channels to be on to have maximum ROI for this campaign).
Collaboration occurred at multiple levels. Firstly, with the internal teams to keep the project up and running following deadlines and prioritizing tasks. This meant speaking with clients to ensure project requirements are gathered accurately. With advertising agency to receive the concept and what answers are they looking for from this research. With media agency to give them insights on demographic profile of users to be targeted with this campaign.
During this time, I worked on testing and evaluating many digital products, concepts and user journeys on websites. Two years ago, when I moved to Canada, I decided to streamline my professional journey into UX Research. I asked myself the big questions, are my skills transferable? Will my knowledge of conducting research prove useful in a tech scenario?
One of the good things about research methodologies is that it is a skill independent of the industry. Depending on my project’s objective and context, I can plan my research activities. Of course, terminologies vary but the science behind analyzing data remains universal. Perhaps, this is the reason why research finds its place in every organization.
I started to reason out my big questions by digging deeper into user research artifacts that I have employed in the past. Here is a brief understanding and utility of a few artifacts during my past projects.
Personas
What is it and where it came from?
A persona is a one-page document that communicates the behaviors of target users of any product. It is a fictional character based on the lives of real people. The structure of a persona primarily emerges from detailed observations and interactions with users. It captures the underlying goals, motivations, challenges and barriers faced by the user in an already existing environment.
Personas as a tool was introduced in the software development process in the 1980s by industry veteran Alan Cooper. He calls it a goal-directed design methodology, the sum of all desired features. It is an imaginative and role play method to bring life to raw data.
What goes into making a successful persona?
In order to effectively apply the personas in design process, the first step is to collect information from the users. The researchers meet the potential and real users of product and deep dive on their usage, attitudes, feelings and behaviors. Following which, the team skims through the data and creates patterns. This helps in creating models to classify users in different categories based on their responses. These categories of potential users in effect explain the users and helps in differentiating them on the way they think, feel and behave. A successful persona is an enactment of a living character of how a person would behave in a given scenario and a given context.
One of the personas I created while defining the target users of a dating app is below:
A successful persona comprises of demographic and psychographic information. Comprehensively, it answers the who, what and why for users.
The key demographics included in user personas are age, gender, income, occupation, education level, location, marital status.
In terms of psychographics, the key attributes to be captured are lifestyle, hobbies, career goals, values and beliefs, priorities, fears and assumptions
The insights about users based on personas is collectively answered by these two sets of data.
Who is it for?
During the entire product development cycle, personas come in handy at various levels. Although the raw data from users is collected by researchers, they are created in collaboration by researchers, product owners and designers. They are used by
designers to make their product design more user-centric
content strategists to produce content in sync with user needs.
marketers to create effective communication strategies
business analysts to gather requirements more efficiently
technical writers to make the user documentation more robust
Pros & Cons of Personas
There is a long running debate on whether personas are an effective tool to house customer understanding. Here is why personas have proved their worthiness over time:
Empathy. In order to realize the pain points of a user, it is necessary to step into their shoes, know their frustrations thoroughly and build solutions.
Storytelling. A narrative methodology helps to create stories that everyone hears and shares. This makes the insights more visual, tangible and concrete.
Collaboration. Personas have the ability to include everyone in design process which means there are different perspectives and shared understanding towards accomplishing the end goal.
However, personas do pose some challenges in the design process. While personas as a methodology isn’t wrong, it is the way they are created and how they are put to use determines their worth.
Inclusive but not Exhaustive. As personas categorizes the users based on their actions and behaviors, it tends to exclude the outliers and exceptions. For a product with larger user base, it is difficult to include all with a handful of personas.
Scope of Attributes. It surely helps in demographic distinctions in terms of users’ age, gender, ethnicity, income and location which may be statistically significant in many projects, but a persona is not comprehensive until it uncovers behaviors, feelings and pain points.
Fictional vs Fake. With the use of stock photos and creating fictional characters, a persona may not be rightly focusing on user needs. While they represent the users, they are not real users. Though imaginative, if not based on research and evidence, personas do not solve the intended purpose. There is a good chance that they are based on assumed and unreal information, in which case, it is unable to solve the design problems at hand.
Hence, it is important to understand the context and timing of using personas as a research tool in the design process.
Tools for creating Personas
The best tools for creating Personas are pen and paper. It helps in making the persona as detailed as possible. There are digital tools available that can be readily used to extract data for the purpose of creating personas.
Google Analytics. This tool gives information about recent visitors on website, where are they from and what product features are they engaging most with. This is useful for digging in market segments as well as user interests. This can be set up for all pages on the website and find the potential user.
Alexa. This tool is primarily used to get demographic reports. It measures the trends for competition and helps get an insight on what is working for them and what’s not. It also highlights the keywords being used by users which can be of great value for content strategists.
Social Media. Scanning twitter and Instagram accounts of potential users can help create a visual image for the user. Quora discussions also delve into users’ pain points and how they are feeling about a certain issue.
Forms. Using tools like Google forms, Survey Monkey or Type form, it is easier to include questions that you’re specifically looking answers for. To find out how the users feel, the emotional quotient can be captured by asking open ended questions.
Jobs to be done (JTBD)
What is it
Jobs to be done (JTBD, as they call it) is a research framework where to understand the users, it is imperative to understand the tasks that users do. These tasks are referred to as “Jobs”. The common terminology is that users either hire or fire a product feature for the jobs to be done. To explain this further, let us consider an example. The customers calling in a support center prefer to talk to a real human than a bot to get their issues resolved, because they feel more confident with human interaction. Hence, the customers hired the human agent and fired the chat bot for their jobs to be done.
How is JTBD put into practice?
JTBD is a user focused approach which focuses on the progress that users are trying to make. While personas focus on the target user, the JTBD framework brings the focus on what people are trying to do. There are a few research methodologies that are applied to understand the user in a JTBD framework.
Contextual Inquiry. The researcher shadows the users while they are purchasing a product or service and understanding the decision process
Switch Interviews. This technique of interview focuses on why the user switched to another feature than the desired feature while accomplishing the task
Purchase Journey. Understanding the users’ journey in a product give us cues on the triggers and barriers they face in order to make progress
JTBD is a new approach that is talking about choices that people make while efficiently making progress towards the desired outcome.
In agency world, I have conducted several contextual interviews and analyzed purchase journeys in order to understand the tasks that users are trying to accomplish.
The effectiveness of JTBD can be measured by writing a job story. A job story comprises of 3 key elements:
What’s the purpose?
JTBD, within a products’ UX strategy uncovers insights for various purposes. It is best used at the intersection of design and marketing to address users’ unmet needs. From defining business strategy to conducting market research, it is useful for a broad spectrum of goals within the product focus. This framework is for:
Clarifying user needs
Defining high level specifications
Validating Brand Perception
Improvising product features
During one of the studies, I conducted contextual interviews to understand the purchase journey of a gourmet shopper and what are they trying to accomplish with their actions and if the brand perception syncs with user needs.
Pros & Cons
JTBD is a lean approach to understanding users’ journey and that makes it a powerful tool in order to understand behavioral changes. As they say, customers don’t buy a product, they hire the product to do a job. Thus, JTBD neatly explains the blockages that may lead to firing a product rather than hiring it. It helps the product team understand the progress that users are making while using the product. It also helps in marketing decisions simply by focusing on triggers to purchase. It maps the forces of progress to see the current situation and what’s taking them to new solutions leading to developing new behaviors.
However, there are certain limitations to this approach of understanding users. This technique is based on a lot of contextual inquiry and relies on customers’ memory on why they hired a certain feature. There is always a chance that the customer may not be able to recall their actions. The best way to combat this issue is to have a follow up conversation with them after the interview.
Empathy Maps
What is it?
An empathy map is a visual representation of users needs and wants. It describes the users’ feelings and actions into four quadrants — quotes and defining words, actions and behaviors, thoughts and beliefs, feelings and emotions.
This method of customer understanding was first introduced by Dave Gary where he emphasized on explaining what the user thinks, feels, says and does. This helps the researcher empathize with the user and address the design challenge with the user perspective in mind.
Who is it for?
Creating an empathy map begins with user research. The data from research is used to populate the four quadrants of the map. This concept is for everyone who is attempting to understand the user needs. Whether it is for the purpose of designing or creating a persona, with user at the center of agile process, empathy map is a quick way to know what the user truly feels and does. Using empathy maps makes it more visually appealing and lets the stakeholders think through the problem at hand.
Creating customer-centric business model designs
Understanding user behavior
Elaborating on user personas
Profiling and Segmenting customers
How is it applied in design process?
There are three steps to follow in the process of creating and using an empathy map.
Create an empathy map — in this article, Dave Gary himself explains how to come up with an empathy map
Synthesize Needs — Use the map to uncover user needs and distinguish them from user wants. Needs can be carved out from user traits mentioned by the user and shape the design problem.
Synthesize Insights — An insight is a realization that will help address the problem at hand. An empathy map can help build a list of potential insights which can form the basis of the new design
Pros & Cons
Single Vs Multiple — An empathy map can be created based on a single user or a user group. When it is created basis user groups, a theme emerges that uncovers the needs of entire group.
Based on evidence — Empathy maps are created using the data from user interviews; it is a good way to remove researcher bias and actually focus on user needs.
Well defined & easy to use — This method of understanding users can be easily used by anyone in the team, the structure is well defined and utilizes the desired information in an efficient way.
However, there are certain points to keep in mind when creating empathy maps -
It is collaborative in nature and can’t be created alone.
It requires a context and primary purpose of creating the map, the findings can not be put to use if the goal is not predefined.
It is more logical to use the insights derived from all four quadrants of the map, rather than singularly using each one of them as the information can be overlapping in some contexts.
While working on an e-commerce project, to uncover the layers of thought process of women buying apparel from an online store, I created an empathy map that looked somewhat like this:
The methodologies employed by a researcher find their application in many contexts and the one underlying denomination of research is its utility as a collaborative tool, be it creative artists, brand managers and insight experts or designers, developers and user insights specialists. The challenge however, may be to adapt to industry specific norms and their own specific regulations to adhere to before conducting research.
Happy to talk more about your challenges and the situations you face while doing research!
