Baby steps to UX Research
Market research | User Interviews
At Dummy designers, we are a group of experienced UX Designers, and this is the journal about our first trial at User Research. Our goal is learning by doing and keeping our learnings refreshed; for that, we have taken up a problem statement which will take us through the design journey on Design Thinking process. You may read more about it on our coming article (Link TBD)
Problem Statement: To create a Financial Goal Tracking system
User: Young college graduate with new job
Market Research
Market research is one of the larger scale Qualitative research, which is generally termed separate from UX Research. Focusing on the market and how the user reacts to existing products gives us a fare idea of what features are working and what needs upgrades.
Market research are quantitative in nature, and gives us KPIs like number of users, visitors, ratings, feedback pointers, and a holistic SWOT analysis. We did this study as part of Competitive Analysis.
We took this into consideration to understand the existing systems who are working in money tracking space. We did product study by using it for almost 3 months, and feedback study by App store and Play store reviews and statistics.
Market Research Report
User Interview
User interview is an important part of User research because of the meaning it brings to the insights. It is easy to categorise people in groups, but it is difficult to understand the individuality. In order to understand this, we need to meet our user set face to face and talk.
There are various ways to conduct User Interviews, but few pointers can help along the way:
- Set your goal for the interview:
— What do you want to know from the discussion?
— What should be the flow of the questionnaire?
— Club the questions under subheadings (Intro, Behaviour, Habits etc)
- Manage the day of discussion:
— Inform the user beforehand about venue, time, etc. and get confirmation.
— Reach the venue on/before the time and make sure the venue is prepared (temperature, seats, noise level etc)
- Keep the questions simple, and be ready to ask sub questions:
— That is, pay attention to what the user tells you, and take that branch of conversation forward to get better insights.
— Note both positives and issues around their personas.
- Keep the environment friendly:
— Do not push the user for answers,
— Try to frame question in better way, if the user does not understand you first time.
— Be professional and contained.
- Maintain eye contact (not too much)
— Do not make the user feel uncomfortable by noting down everything they say.
— Maybe ask for recording the whole conversation before starting, and make notes of important keywords that define their conversation.
— Keep the discussion conversation-like, and less like an interrogation.
Interview Report
We conducted the interviews in-house as we have abundance of our user set here.
Dummy point: We had the first interview within the club and had everyone sit and monitor the interview. This way we were able to point out the common mistakes (only visible to third person), and prepare ourselves better for coming interviews.
The result of User interview can be:
- User persona
- Problem statement details
- Possible features
- Mind maps
- Journey Maps
These interviews gave us a good insight into the young Indian populace’s life around money management. This process also kept the cornerstone to our journey into User Research.
We will be building the foundation around these findings soon. Follow us in this journey to learn, share your thoughts, ask questions, and to help us learn.
Looking forward to your inputs! Cheers.
