This is Where User Experience Research in Beautiful Design
Have you ever wonder where is user experience research (UXR) comes into the place in the steps of the design process? As the UX researcher, do you find yourself lost in design?
Sometimes, we do, huh? This post is my attempt to find where UXR stands in design steps.
We all know that UXR process is complicated. Another level of complication is added when it comes to understanding where UXR stands in the design process. Some UX projects make us feel that the ideas and process are all over the sky. Things are messy and you need to figure out where are you.
The Design Council in the UK created a good representation of design to explain the divergent thinking (possible ideas are created) and convergent thinking (narrowing down to the best idea) steps. The Design Council has outlined the common creative processes in different design specialism can be illustrated in Double Diamond model [1].
The idea here is to answer the main question in design [2]:
How to get from point A — “Don’t know” to point B — “Do know”. In other words, divergent thinking to convergent thinking steps. According to the double diamond model, this happens 2 times to confirm the problem and validating the solutions to the problem. The Design Council also warns us to include the left-hand diamond to avoid ending up solving the wrong problem.
The design steps are iterative. An iterative approach to design requires designers to incrementally developing and refining ideas based on feedback and evaluation [4]. This approach ensures to test and refine ideas and drop the weak ones.
Double diamond includes 4 steps to explain the design processes which are Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver — the Double Diamond.
Discover — It is the step that should be at the start of the project. Designers search for new questions, ideas and collect insights.
Define — Designers synthesized the information gathered in order to make sense of all the possibilities discovered. Basically, it is the step that information is synthesized into design insights for creating a well-defined focus. In this step, designers reduce the number of possibilities to a well crafted and defined set of few ideas that looks like the best solution to the initial problem.
Develop — In this steps concepts are created, prototyped and tested. This step includes lots of trial errors and many iterations. Ideas are improved and refined during the iterations so that your solutions offer enough solidity to find out whether they solve the problem at hand.
Delivery — In this steps working solution as products/services are produced and shipped.
Where User Experience Research in Double Diamond Model
The double diamond model gives us a clear way of thinking to figure out where we are (user experience research) standing in the design process. This is valid if your company follows such a similar process to double diamond model. As the design flow in the steps with an iterative nature, you can follow it and position your research activities to support the design process. In each cycle and step the designers’ needs will be different and UXR can help to fulfill these applying different methodologies.
You can see the user experience research that may support the different steps in the double diamond model are illustrated in the diagram below:
STEP 1 — Discover: In Step 1, as a user experience researcher, you should have clear reasons and ideas on what do you need to learn from your users. In this step UXR focus on understanding users’ problems, behaviors, desires and users’ perceptions of using products in the future. This step involves identifying your target users, understanding users’ daily experiences and finding patterns in users’ interactions in their daily social environment.
The main idea in step 1 is to observe your users and learn from them. We follow and observe the users in their daily environments and get insights from the way of doing, thinking and feeling things. Since users’ behaviors are complex in nature and may be hard to discover in their complicated social interactions, this step is very critical for UX researcher to work methodically to gather the best insights for the design team. The following methods listed here can help you to achieve this:
1. Ethnographic Field Studies
2. Contextual Inquiries
3. Diary Studies
4. Interviews
5. Focus Groups
6. Competitive Analysis
7. Participatory Design
8. Surveys and Questionnaires
9. Usability Testing and Benchmarking
STEP 2 — Define:In this step user experience researchers helps the designers to understand the bigger picture by synthesizing gathered information and narrowing the results. UXR should apply practices to help designers to prioritize and filter. The most promising ideas to develop discussion to next steps. Some UXR methods that can be helpful in this steps are:
1. Focus Groups
2. Card Sorting
3. Journey Maps
4. Pair Comparisons [6]
5. The “Buy a Feature” Exercise [6]
6. Impact-Effort Analysis [8]
7. Kano Model [8]
STEP 3 — Develop: During Step 1 and Step 2, UXR role was focused on identifying needs and generating ideas to meet that need. This stage is all about to test these ideas. This step includes prototyping and testing of ideas with many trial errors and iterations. UXR support designers to test assumptions and hypothesis to help them to improve and refine the ideas. UXR usually test the prototype to see whether it meets the need in the best possible way and then UXR take learnings from testing and amend the design. [7]. The prototyping process usually iterates until the team is satisfied with the results of the test. UXR teams run these usually by utilizing usability testing, usability benchmarking, role-playing and concept testing methods. The resulting outcome means the team has the best possible product which is at/or a very close market the release (usually this is an MVP).
STEP 4 — Delivery: This step means that the products/services are produced and shipped. But, it doesn’t mean that user experience research is over. UXR teams continue to learn more about the actual use of the product to help the design and product teams to constantly improve the product. Also, after official lunch, UXR teamwork on proving the value product. For this role, user experience researcher may apply the following methods:
1. Metrics analysis
2. A/B testing
3. Usability Test
4. Clickstream Analysis
5. User Interviews
6. Customer satisfaction surveys
Final Notes:
Double diamond model is a very clear method. However, we should also keep in mind the team you work with may not have a clear double diamond process and/or they may have totally different work model than the double diamond model. Also, even your team is following the double diamond model, depending on the project and the design team internal process the steps they follow in double diamond may be changed sometime. In addition, we should also keep in mind that the process in the double diamond model is iterative and not linear.
In conclusion, as a user experience researcher, we can use the double diamond method to guide us to learn where we are standing in different design phases. During the times that we were lost in the design process, double diamond model directed me and my team to see our standpoint. I tried to illustrate how user experience research may take the position in the design process and what tools/ methods can be applied to each step of the double diamond model.
At the end of the day, the double diamond model may support user experience research team to create a point of view to focus on the most important thing: to help design and product team in delivering the right features, with the good user experience for the true users.
Reference:
[1] https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/design-process-what-double-diamond
[2] https://medium.com/seek-blog/design-thinking-101-the-double-diamond-approach-ii-4c0ce62f64c7
[3]https://www.nngroup.com/articles/iterative-design/
[4]http://www.instructionaldesign.org/models/iterative_design/
[8] https://uxstudioteam.com/ux-blog/prioritization-techniques/
