The Conducting & Constructing Process of UX Research
🦑 Initial Interactions
When I first joined my research team, I thought that conducting an interview would be much more focused on attempting to engage the interviewee in a casual-sounding conversation rather than referring to strategic techniques in the back of my mind.
There’s more to a User Interview than just speaking to the interviewee and openly conversing. In order to dig for information, the qualitative research process comes with numerous concepts that can be recycled throughout a running interview.
✍🏾 What is Qualitative Research?
Qualitative research is a process of gathering non-numerical data for analyzing and breaking through to emerging insights and noteworthy concepts. Researchers use this form of data collection in order to better their understanding of the vast and immeasurable wonder that is the human experience.
Without qualitative research, it is extremely difficult to reconstruct a comprehensive thought process of the human mind from an analytical point of view. The research process that I found myself most heavily working with involved conducting user interviews, writing analytic memos, and participating in holistic coding.
The link below contains some user research methods that are commonly used:
📌 Breaking Down the Interview Process
What Needs to be Assessed
Main goals:
Developing a hypothesis is integral to figuring out what information you are scouting for during an interview. Apart from predetermined concerns, unexpected insights are often stumbled upon during user interviews. These surprise findings often help researchers learn more about the user themself and are worth sharing when it comes to dissecting the user’s needs.
Mindset & Behavior Observation:
Observing behavioral responses to dissect the user’s needs is necessary for a thorough interpretation of the user’s point of view. This process is often referred to as needfinding, which is more generally defined as process of understanding user needs.
Techniques that are heavily important for this purpose:
- Noting significant insights and comments that highlight a user’s perspective or angle from which they are speaking from.
- Pinpointing undesirable characteristics of a circumstance by questioning how a problem is created in the first place.
Conducting the Interview
Forming Empathy for the User:
- Use phrases that show understanding/concern. Empathize with them!
- Create an atmosphere in which the user can display confidence. Users are more likely to speak with a clear mind when they are in a comfortable environment.
- Let the user speak for the majority of the time. This can really help you dig for hints or find openings to other doors within your conversation.
- Keep an open mind when listening to the user speak. Imagine thoughts from their perspective and have a clean slate when understanding what they are saying.
Phrasing Drives the User’s Responses
- Avoid using leading questions or convincing arguments that sway the user’s responses toward a certain direction.
- Stick to basic and impartial responses. This forces the user to lead their own discussion and often explore their thoughts more deeply. A short follow-up question can also trigger a more detailed response.
- Phrase questions to reignite specific incidences of significance. Phrases like “Walk me through the last time you…” can help the user remember particular moments of interest.
📔 Constructing Memos
Writing memos is the process in which researchers gather their thoughts for a comprehensive organization and study. Rather than being a quick note, every memo is expected to be followed with an analysis that makes further reflections more understandable.
In simpler terms, memos can be defined as a pathway for researchers to break down data into developing theories.
👋🏾 My Overall Experience
As a student research assistant, I truly expected to go into the research lab focused on the singular aspect of user interface design. However, as I began to understand the goal of my team, I realized that there was more to the design process than creating hands-on designs. The work that goes on behind the scenes for a design to eventually be constructed and put together is first done by the research team that conducts interviews.
My Favorite Take-Away:
User interviews offer something that is hard to find in most settings: a look into the participant’s mind. It is easily the most valuable asset in the creation of any user-related project.
The entire experience has definitely made me appreciate the User Research process way more than I did at the start of my project. Although personal work has aligned with a UI Design focus, I would definitely like to venture into more User Experience Research by conducting more interviews and participating in the general process that follows after. I love the experience that I have had so far and would like to do more work in the area in the future.
