We had 2 great talks about customer research for our March session. Thank you Jo Squire & Katie Phillips, both User Experience Researchers from Australia Post, for an excellent evening!
FYI, we’ll be running another session on customer research in a couple months so hope to see you there!
Excited for this one #prodanon ‘learning from your customers’ pic.twitter.com/J1bK0H90Uh
— Zinzi Bianca (@zinzibianca) March 16, 2017
Doing Research: Discovery & Validation – Jo Squire
The research method you use will vary depending on several things including if you’re in a discovery or validation phase.
If you are in discovery, you might be looking for the problem or trying to get a better understanding of the problem. In this space, you’re looking for ‘why’ and it’s not at all the time to bring in prototypes! Observation, contextual inquiries and questionnaires are some of the methods to use here.
people don’t tell you their problems, you need to look at themes and synthesis #prodanon
— product anonymous (@product_anon) March 16, 2017
Getting some great tips at #prodanon for using @SlackHQ in user testing. Fired up to do some guerilla testing now 👊
— cameron (@friendlyunit) March 16, 2017
Once you move to validation, you’re looking to understand ‘how’ ie how is the product being used. Usability testing & co-design workshops are some of the methods you can use.
Jo reminded us that ‘research’ doesn’t have to cost a bomb or take a long time. No matter what your budget, everyone can incorporate research into their product. Low cost options include talking to your customers on the street, observing (potentially free!) & you can be creative about how you reward the participants.
Once you do the research, you need to communicate it within your organisation and the best way to do this is to include your stakeholders while you’re doing the research. If you can’t include them, try showing the video you captured during the research.
End-to-end validation & optimization via diary study – Katie Phillips
Katie talked us through a diary study she did for an Australia Post product. This was a product in the wild which was being constantly developed. Based on the research objective & other criteria, they decided to use a diary study & moderated user testing.
Their research participants were not in the office so they choose remote user testing using live video/screen sharing for the user testing and Slack for the diary study. To select a research method there are several things to consider including the objective, how much time you have and your budget.
This is the 2nd time the AusPost team used Slack for research. Even though none of the participants had used Slack before, it was easy to onboard them and they understood how to communicate & share photos of their processes.
One of the things Katie talked about (which I think was amazingly fantastic!) is how involved the development team was during the research. They witnessed the screen sharing so knew right away about the problems users faced plus they scheduled time into their existing sprint so they could work on anything that came up during the research. Way to work together!
Katie shared a few resources:
- IDEO Method cards
- When to use which user experience research method
- Remote Usability and UX Research Tools
Q&A time
Tips for the data
- Always keep the raw data (ie video) so you can play it to the stakeholder
- If a research company does the research for you, try and be with
them for at least part of the sessions and ask them to send you the raw data - Tools for analysis – Depends on the research but they utalise Google sheets & post it notes a lot.
- After you analyse the data, make sure it’s available to the project team & possibly other teams (to help with their problem solving).
Most challenging part of their job?
It depends on the project but often it’s recruiting of the research participants. Others include: having a prototype with the right tasks, getting clear objectives from stakeholders and deadlines that are very close to the product launch.
Are there tools for privacy/ethics/legal? Tips?
Make sure your participants know what is expected of them & that the product is being tested, not them. You should have them sign a non-disclosure agreement and your legal team (or participant recruitment company) will have other templates you can use.
Ethics-wise, you should ‘follow your moral compass’ but there’s lots of reading online to help
Thanks tons to Aconex for hosting!
