The Art of balanced UX Research
The sentence above is to describe the basic principle of Lagom. Linnea Dunne, a Swedish writer who developed a lifestyle guidebook, Lagom: The Swedish Art of Balanced Living, defines it as a concept that more or less means the balance and full awareness of every activity somebody undertakes. Today, this concept has been widely practised, mainly by minimalists.
An example of Lagom in everyday life is removing unwanted or unused items and replacing them with some that are more multifunctional and quickly found. Also, the concept of work-life balance is very close to lagom. Rather than burning out with a 60-hour working week and then getting stressed, Lagom encourages balance and living somewhere in the middle.
In my daily work as a UX researcher, I also realised that the concept of Lagom could also help me in my work. It can apply in some of the technical steps of research: when determining the number of people (respondents) involved, when building rapport, when interviewing users, and when giving rewards to my respondents.
Determining the number of respondents
Can all conversations be called ‘interviews’? Certainly not. An ‘interview’ is an interactional communication between two parties with a specific purpose and involves questions and answers. How many people should be included in an interview setting, and what are their roles? Eye contact is a critical element in an interview, and having too many people in a single session will make it complicated for the research to remain ‘present’ in front of the interviewee(s).
I once interviewed a respondent while writing down their answers because I didn’t have time to listen to the recorded files later on. However, I saw my respondent starting to feel bored and answered each question briefly as if he’s trying to finish the interview quickly. Therefore, I believe it would be much more efficient if you could get somebody else to be your notetaker. The formula is as follows:
(Researcher) + (Respondent) + (Notetaker) = Effective Interview
Another reason for limiting the people involved in an interview session is to prevent the respondent from feeling intimidated. When a respondent feels intimidated, their answers might be biased, and they might not tell the truth, especially when they have to try your product. From my experience, intimidated respondents tend to say “I like your product, it works well for me, easy to use, buttons are intuitive, and the interface looks overall good. On a scale of one to five, it’s a five-star product”.
In a single qualitative research project (interviews or usability tests), five respondents should be enough to gather insights from a group of users with similarities. For instance, when doing research on e-wallet behaviour, for example, I would get five respondents who are e-wallet users and five respondents who are not. Thus, there’d be ten interviews in total.
Building rapport
The purpose of building rapport is to engage in a good relation with your respondent so you, the researcher, can absorb information naturally. Usually, the best time to build rapport is during the first 5 minutes of the interview. You can ask how the respondent got to the meeting location or how the traffic was. You can also ask about his work or hobbies. This technique could be done not only during the interview but even before the interview.
One thing you need to ensure when building your rapport is the respondent’s ‘level of comfort’. Those who are too “comfortable” have the potential to become too talkative that they may talk about things far beyond the context or even lead the conversation. One of the ways to find out whether or not the respondent is comfortable before starting the interview is by checking their eye contact and their response to small talks. Respondents who already feel comfortable tend to be more courageous to maintain eye contact with the interviewer and become more active in small talks.
The length of the interview
The truth is that the more questions you ask, the longer the time you take to complete a session. It also depends on what information you want your respondents to convey. If you aim to explore behavior, it can go up to an hour, and 30 minutes longer when you add some usability test scenarios. Each session should not exceed two hours because you and/or your respondent may lose focus.
On the other hand, the interview process that is too short may give a negative perception among respondents. They make an effort to come to the interview, so spend a considerable amount of time (at least 45 minutes). Alternatively, if you only have a few questions, and they do not require in-depth answers, it is better to do a phone interview instead. When I conducted additional research to evaluate payment methods on Tokopedia to follow up on a recent study, I chose to call respondents who gave low scores to better understand the difficulties they experienced.
Reward
The easiest way to attract respondents is by rewarding them, and this is usually communicated when you invite them via email. However, if you offer too much reward, you will most likely get “reward seekers” or those who come to your interviews just for the sake of the gifts you’ve prepared. People like this usually only give friendly answers because they want to please you as the interviewer.
Too little reward will cause problems either. Respondents spend not only time but also money to get to your interview. Because the attractiveness of the reward will highly depend on each respondent, I usually refuse to mention what they would get and say “cool gifts” or “our exclusive merchandise” instead.
All in all, with Lagom, I learned that balance is vital in research. Our role as researchers also involves determining the right length and the correct respondent number to do the research itself with the ‘just right’ intensity. My experience could be different from other researchers, so we all need to look back and assess our needs, so we know how each research project can be made efficient. Leave your comments below, and I will be delighted to find out how your experience relates to this matter.
