If You Have To Cut Your UX Research Dramatically
How much time we can cut from our research to accelerate the process? How much time do you really need for your UX research? It is a frequent question I am always facing to answer as user experience research lead. I don’t have a chart or a standard table — like the one that you can use in your statistic course, that can be helpful to answer the questions. However, we can try to estimate the time requirements by looking the nature of the project and use some tricks and shortcuts to make things faster. In this article, I will share especially the shortcuts to help user experience research to happen quicker.
We generally have two types of UX researches. First one is the generative research, in which we are dealing to explore the value and opportunities for a product idea. The other one is the evaluative research, where we are trying to validate assumptions.
The generative UX research comes at play in the first half of double diamond. In this phase UX researchers are mostly interested in understanding the users and users’ problems, behaviors, desires and users’ perceptions of using products in future. The evaluative user experience research is where we test the ideas in design process. This ideally requires a prototype that can help users to grasp the concepts with a working example. Prototypes also allow UX researchers and designers to do many trial errors and iterations to create a working solutions to be ready to deliver to market.
Cut your Research Time
One very useful trick you can use is to learn from others. Isaac Newton illustrates explains this process well:
“If I have seen further, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants” [1].
It is a very fundamental practice to use others’ previous work and ideas to use to create something new in science and other areas research. Why can t we do the same for the user experience research?
Once you learn from the others, you don’t have to spend the time to re-invent the wheel. Practically, that means you don’t have to run full fetch research activities to discover what is already discovered. You can borrow ideas from others and implement these in a prototype and test it. This will dramatically cut from your generative research time.
We can easily learn from others’ research (if any available) to understand what is working and what is not. Google search will help to reach the available research. Usually, you can reach good articles discussing product ideas and some good UX research behind it. Also, there are blogs of research groups of several companies that tell the stories about the product decisions. In addition, many researchers give talks on several events that can give you some ideas about what is going on. These talks are generally available in video or podcast formats.
How much to Cut in your UX Research: Understanding Market and Learning from Others.
The trick here is to figure out where your product is standing in the market. Here, I use a very simple idea to help user experience researchers to see where is the product in the market.
In the following chart you see 3 place that your product status in the market. Your product’s market stand is always related to product evaluation and the market itself, which are both not static but can be frozen in a time -frame. So don’t forget that your product can change place when it evolves or the market.
(*Note the ratio of the pie is there just to represent the time needs)
Level 1 — Product is very close to the market: This is where your product is very close to the market. This means that there a market readily available for the product; the design and development work is very close to being finished. How to interpret this: First of all, if the product somehow can be developed that means there is the technology available to do that. Development techniques are known and/or possible to be known (e.g. the technique is progressing). Users have some expectations about it and may be ready for the product since there are some ideas already developed in the market and/or the ideas feeding the product is somehow known (e.g. discussed on the internet and some articles are published related to it).
For these type of products, it is a very good idea to look outside. Because there would be many similar products or related products on the market. For example, you are launching a ride-hailing app that may also provide an in-car entertainment system that follows pay per use method. Let’s say you think this is very innovative and you are the first company that will introduce the idea in the market. However, the technology is fairly known and there are other similar products on the market. First of all, in travel entertainment systems are readily available. There are some companies do that, for bus or plane (e.g. Global Eagle). Also, pay-per-use streaming services are available on the market (e.g. Netflix and Spotify).
In that case, for a level 1 product like this in-car entertainment system, you may learn from the others and quickly implement ideas in prototypes as well. As a UX researcher, you can just do a quick literature study to learn good and bad things about these technologies and services. Then, you can communicate these to your design and product team. Since you know most of the things by just following others’ learning points, you can quickly create a prototype and start testing, re-testing and re-testing.
In that way, you may cut the time need for your generative research, especially in cases when you don’t have resources to cover all the aspects. You can put more time and focus on prototyping and other evaluative user experience research activities.
Level 2 — Product needs time to be on the market: This is the middle way. In that state, your product is not very close to the market or not very far from it. This means, there are some technologies that are available on market. You can use the know-how from these readily available technologies in your research and prototyping. On the other hand, there are some technologies not readily available to you. These are the ones you have to focus on your generative research to understand the concepts and users’ need around these technologies. You may want to put the good amount of time on these areas so that you can guide the product decisions around the new technologies. After you finished the generative research part you can go with early prototypes within many iterations to learn more about the new technologies that you want to use in your new product. For example, think about the iPhone. It wasn’t the first product that has the capability of a smartphone, touchscreen interface, and mobile phone. Actually, the iPhone had gone from a tablet to a phone [2]. So if you were developing an iPhone you can study with these technologies to learn from them and use the know-how in your UX research. On the other hand, there were totally new technologies, such as sensors to enhance the experience, like an accelerometer, a proximity sensor and an ambient light etc. For these new interface experiences, it is absolutely necessary to do the research to see how users behave and interact with these technologies. Your team will be the first to generate know-how with these technologies. You have to do a good amount of contextual research to uncover the cognitive, social and emotional needs of users as well as the opportunities for product ideas. So generative research is very necessary as much as the and evaluative research in that case.
Level 3 — Product looks far in the market: This is where you have no chance to access similar technologies and products that are close to the one you like to design and develop. This is where you need to put a lot of effort into generative research first. Because you have to cover everything from scratch. Thus, generative research may take more time then the evaluative research. For example, about 15 years ago, if you like to conduct a user experience research in social robotics area, you wont have much chances to find a product on the market readily available so that you can get know-how from others or you can use other companies’ robots in your UX research easily to test some ideas. The only way to learn was to conduct your own research to discover all the aspects of the robots and human interactions. (Fortunately, there are many robots readily available today such as Nao robot for you to prototype and many scenarios quickly and easily).
Similarly, if you have a product of the future, then you have to take a lot of time to conduct generative research to learn about the users’ reaction to this new technology.
In summary, if you need to see the time requirements of the project, you can use these categorizations above to make better estimations. Your product level in the market in relation to other products will help you to pinpoint the time allocation for generative and evaluative research.
I just share strategic ideas on user Experience Research to help us to grow.
References:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
