Experiment with Your Approach to UX to Bring Your Work to the Next Level
Good UX work involves trying new research and analysis methods to get key user input you might be missing.
At Marketade, we’re very lucky to have leaders who encourage us to try something new without the fear of reprimand if it fails. Heard about a new research technique and want to try it out? “Go for it.” Want to shake up a tried-and-true deliverable template to better suit project needs? “Let me know how I can support you.” This isn’t the case everywhere, and it’s one of the reasons I love my job.
As a fully remote UX research consultancy, we receive various types of projects, which means we get to use various UX skills depending on the project at hand. Tree testing, card sorting, site mapping, usability testing, competitive research, persona-building, journey maps, etc. — we get to try it all, when the right project comes along. That alone is enough to keep a UX’er excited. When you make room to experiment, it moves to the next level.
Rethinking and iterating any part of the research process
One area I find our team discussing often is new ways to recruit research participants. In order to get accurate user feedback, it’s important to recruit users who are as close to the real end-users as possible. For general usability testing, we use a user recruiting platform and it works well. However, lately I’ve found myself looking for specialized users who aren’t generally on those platforms or who are particularly hard to pin down. For example, we were looking for industrial machinists and found they usually have packed schedules and can’t make the time to sit on a computer with us (especially not for a gift card that’s a mere portion of what they would make from an hour of regular work time).
My colleague Nora and I brainstormed how we can reach these folks, how to present the research opportunity and compensation in a more enticing manner, and how to use different research methods to get valuable user insight. We knew this type of user did not have time to sit on a computer with us for a video call and screenshare as they used a site, so how else could we gather feedback? We found interviewing customer service staff as part of our UX research was a valuable line of sight into users’ behaviors and questions. We also set up live-intercept recruiting surveys on some of these clients’ websites to meet with real site visitors. How cool is that!
Bringing new methods to the team and putting them into practice
To experiment, it’s helpful to stay connected to what’s going on in the UX world. Last fall, I attended a local UX conference called UX Y’all, and one of the presenters, Leah Kaufman, discussed conducting user interviews with pairs of participants, known as dyads. She found that when two participants were in a session together, they seemed more at ease, and they interacted with the product or service as they would with any friend in their usual day-to-day life. As a researcher, Kaufman listened to the dyad explain the website to each other, what they were seeing, discuss what they thought was going on, and answer each others’ questions. Sometimes one participant would gloss over a piece of information and the other would point it out and explain why that information is important. This sounded like UX gold!
I was excited about the success Kaufman was describing and eager to figure out how I could try it out at my own job. Kaufman worked at an on-site research facility, so dyads were able to meet in person, look over each others’ shoulders, and discuss while looking at the same screen. I worked remotely and conducted most of my user interviews via virtual conferencing software, but most of this could still be replicated to some degree.
Luckily, the opportunity arose one day when a scheduled participant asked, “Hey, my colleague X also works with this software. Do you mind if she joins our call today?” It was happening! My first dyad. These participants worked in the same office, so they joined from the same computer and were able to mimic the in-person interactions I mentioned earlier (looking over each others’ shoulders, pointing to the shared screen, etc.). Both participants’ audio was clear for the meeting, and their feedback and site interactions were captured in the meeting recording. It was a success!
Persistence and determination
I know for many UX’ers, it might be hard to convince stakeholders and leaders to invest in UX work, and most of your role might involve designing and integrating features that aren’t backed by research. Rather, someone has requested the new features because they’re “cool and innovative” or they work well for competitors. While integrating those features might improve your product, why gamble the time, money, and resources when you can test how they would impact your product through user research? Of course, even better would be to focus on the user needs first, features later, but that’s a story for another day.
UX research doesn’t have to look like 30–45 minute Zoom calls using screenshare to be valuable. It can be as simple as 10–15 minute phone calls, followed by prototype testing and iteration. It can be paper prototyping and visiting common areas to test it with users. Magic happens when you’re willing to get your hands dirty and get creative about approaching the task at hand.
