Preface

Foreword

I was on stage at UX Manchester and I made a flippant comment about how all focus groups were a waste of time when it came to researching the user experience. When questions came at the end of my talk, a hand shot up. “I don’t agree with your comment about focus groups. They have their uses. All research methods have their strengths and weaknesses.” That hand belonged to James Lang. He came and found me afterwards and we debated the merits of user research methods. At the end of the conversation, I asked if he was looking for a job.

Emma brings 10 years of formal research experience in psychology, cognition, medicine, biology and, of course, user experience. Emma and James are two of the best researchers I’ve ever worked with. I’ve learned so much from working with them on many UX research projects over the years.

This book represents Emma and James’s many years of research experience. Their practical advice on how to run an insightful, successful research project is the key to making your digital products even better.

Series editor Joe Leech (@mrjoe) Bristol, UK, August 2017. PS. I was right about focus groups – see Chapter 2.

If You Feel Unsure, Then Read On

You’re beginning a user research project. You want it to go well. You want it to be interesting, to learn something new and to generate ideas. Most importantly, you want your project to make a difference. This book will show you how to achieve all of that.

This book is about the craft, the technique and the processes involved in running a design research project. Whether you’re in discovery or evaluation mode, whether your project is agile or waterfall, research is at the heart of user-centered design. Because it’s so central, we believe that research should be an activity that the whole team gets to participate in and feel ownership of.

At the same time, design research can sometimes seem a daunting, confusing world unto itself. With its own codes and jargon, it can feel like the domain of specialists, forbidden to outsiders who haven’t been trained in the rules. If you’ve ever felt out of your depth on a research project, been unsure what to do next, or wondered whether you’re “doing it wrong”, then this book is for you.

What We’ll Cover in this Book

Over the next nine chapters, we’ll pass through the stages of a qualitative design research project. The primary focus is on the practicalities: our intention is to share a step-by-step guide so you know what do to at each point… especially if you’re stuck! Alongside that, though, we’ve provided a rationale, not least because being able to understand and justify your approach is pretty useful in itself.

The structure of the book follows the sequence of a research project:

The research cycle

Design

Chapter 1 shows how to scope and kick off your project, involving stakeholders to ensure you’re working to the right objectives.

Chapter 2 walks through the process of choosing a methodology, and the different considerations which play a part in your decision.

Setup

Chapter 3 covers the different methods for recruiting people to take part in your research, and how to ensure you get the right participants.

Chapter 4 outlines the role of a discussion guide (aka session plan, aka script) and shows you how to piece it together part-by part.

Chapter 5 looks at the runup to your research sessions, and the preparation involved with lab-based, remote and contextual studies.

Fieldwork

Chapter 6 shows you how to manage a research session, and how to be successful in the roles of observer, note-taker or moderator.

Chapter 7 focuses on the detail of interviewing, exploring the anatomy of questions and the role of observation.

Analysis

Chapter 8 lays out a system of analysis, describing each of the main phases and showing you which activities to deploy to achieve your specific purpose.

Impact

Chapter 9 shows how to bring the project to a successful conclusion, using deliverables and engagement techniques to maximise the impact of your work.

Unless you’re completely new to research, you’re probably more familiar with some of these aspects of the process than others. You should be able to dip into the book as required, rather than reading from front to back, with a couple of exceptions:

• If you want to know how to run research sessions, it’s a good idea to look at Chapters 4, 6 and 7.
• If you’re interested in how to ensure your projects have maximum impact, the information you need is in both Chapter 1 and Chapter 9.

The Gist of the Book

As we’ve already mentioned, this book is more interested in the practicalities of research than the theory. That said, if you read on you’ll see several ideas surface repeatedly. Let’s introduce them:

Research is a team sport. We believe research projects are most effective when the whole team’s involved, not when one or two specialists are tasked with going away to ‘do research’ and come back with an answer. Working as a team - sharing the hypothesising, interviewing and analysis - brings the designers, developers, content owners and others much closer to the actual user experience, rather than having it fed back to them via a report or presentation. It’s a better, more rewarding experience for everyone, but more importantly it makes the research more likely to have an impact. You may not always be able to get the whole team involved throughout, but we’ll share the workarounds you can use to achieve nearly the same result.

When you’re making decisions about your project, think about the end point and work backwards. Whether it’s to generate new ideas, build empathy for users, understand a problem better, or inform decision-making, your project has an end goal. In most cases, this’ll be a combination of overt, stated objectives and more obscure aims that you’ll have to figure out from talking to stakeholders. Don’t lose sight of the end goal, because it should inform your decisions at every point. For example, if your end point is to build empathy with users among disengaged stakeholders, then that will inform your choice of methodology and sample, the types of data you collect, and the approach you use to analyse and report it. It’ll also determine the way you involve stakeholders throughout the project. We’ll show you why you need to stay aware of those choices and consciously direct your approach with the end goal in mind, rather than just hoping for the best.

Successful research is about driving design decisions through engagement, not delivering documents. To be most effective, research projects are about enabling the people who make decisions about things to experience the lives of the people who use those things. If you can give stakeholders an in-person connection with their users, you'll enhance and enrich their work, and they'll thank you for it. You'll also help them make better decisions more easily, and therefore do better work, and they'll love you for that. Good and easy decisions don't often come from reading research reports, often because there's no human experience connected with the recommendations and they're therefore not followed. Also, it's easy to put a report away and ignore it, especially if it doesn't fit that person’s agenda. But when a stakeholder has seen users first-hand as they comment on or do something, recommendations are much more likely to be implemented. We’ll show you how to get stakeholders engaged, and keep them engaged, using deliverables as the final call to action.

Do as much research as you need to, and then stop. You need to be able to justify the time you spend on research: there’s no point in large-scale research projects that deliver no outcome. Instead, we’d argue for sequences of bite-sized projects, taking a slightly different focus and methodology each time. Moving in this way, and accruing insight as you go, allows you to find out just what you need and no more, leaving your time and budget free to act on what you’ve found. Erika Hall calls this ‘just enough research’, and we think it’s a great way of balancing out the risk of ill-informed decisions against the cost of further projects. We’ll share some planning tools you can use to structure your project, and decide when enough’s enough.

Analysis starts at the beginning. As you begin a research project, you’ll already have ideas, hunches and preconceptions about the subject you’re investigating. Instead of trying to ignore them, you should get them out in the open. Confusingly, research projects have a distinct ‘analysis stage’, but in practice analysis is something that you do throughout the project, by taking your initial impressions and then challenging and evolving them through talking to and observing users (a process that Roddy Glen calls ‘rolling hypotheses’). Ultimately, the purpose of research is to make better decisions. The process of engaging with users is purely to arrive at better informed, more substantiated, more inspired decisions. We’ll show you rigorous, practical tools you can use to turn your initial thoughts into findings and recommendations at the end of the project.

Research is about consent. User-centered design is based on the belief that by understanding and delivering what users need, you can achieve better outcomes for your organisation. To do this, you need empathy and respect: going beyond a superficial understanding of people as consumers, or users, or customers, and engaging with them deeply as real, rounded people with needs, motivations, emotions and desires. Think of your research as a collaboration between your team, as designers, and the people who use your product or service. If you’re conscious of the reasons why they might (or might not) want to take part, the ways that the research experience might affect them, their preconceptions and concerns, then you’re not just being a good person, you’re being a good designer too. We’ll walk you through the steps you should take to engage with participants and their data with respect and care.

Enough theory. It’s time to start your project.

Acknowledgments

Many people helped us to write this book. The editorial team at SitePoint, Joe Leech and Simon Mackie, expertly guided the project with a blend of encouragement and critique. Our technical editor, Kate Towsey, offered an inspiring alternative perspective and challenged our missteps.

Particular thanks to the colleagues at cxpartners who read and responded to early drafts: Mark Skinner, James Chudley, Angelique Alexander, Mina Bach and Audun Clark. We were lucky to have input from other experts in the field too: Kristy Blazio at Usability One, Roddy Glen (formerly of Strategic Research Group), Barbara Langar (formerly of eBay, now at Insight Angels), Gemma Newell at the BBC, and David Whittle at Spotify. Finally, the people who laid the foundations: Romin Tafarodi, Alison Lyon and Pete Comley.

Conventions Used

You’ll notice that we’ve used certain typographic and layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Tips, Notes, and Warnings

Supplementary Materials

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