Monthly Archives: April 2017

Working with user research

Posted on by
Reply

Back in March, we discussed different types of user research and focused in on diary studies. In May, we’re talking about how work with those insights to build products and some of the challenges you may face.

We have 2 amazing speakers on Thursday May 25th with first hand experience.Through a case study and reflection, they’ll show what it’s like to run user research and let the results drive the product & features.

RSVP now

Using Experience Sampling for Rapid Insights into User Needs

In this case study, George Cockerill will share how using the Experience Sampling method gave rich insights into user needs for the feature ideation of a brand new mobile app at Deakin University.

As part of the research activities to inform the development of a smart assistant app for students, Experience Sampling quickly gave the product team useful and relevant data to help understand student needs, behaviours and pain-points in multiple contexts over time.

George will talk share his experience of planning, executing and analysing the results from an experience sampling study. With practical advice on how to run the study, tools and techniques, the key points you need to know and things to watch out for.

Why is Marathon Running Important when Introducing User Research?

During the last decade, user research has been a key component of the product development process. Within the games industry there has been a significant effort that focuses on introducing and integrating user research as part of a ‘player first’ culture. Numerous challenges exist when doing so -especially when working with teams who have not been exposed to user research previously.

Kostas Kazakos will reflect on these challenges via his personal journey as a marathon runner and guided by Donald Schon’s reflective practitioner’s approach

He will also introduce DECEMA – a frame of reference whose aim is to help UX practitioners when introducing user research to development teams and organizations.

Our Speakers

George Cockerill is a Senior UX Designer at Deakin University, a Lead UX Instructor at General Assembly, an organiser of the UX Melbourne Book Club and can be found on Twitter at @GeorgeCockerill.

Kostas Kazakos is a User Experience Researcher with a qualitative mind and a quantitative heart. He currently manages the user/player research at Firemonkeys (an Electronic Arts studio located in Melbourne). For the last 10 years, Kostas has been handling primitive research problems in the mobile space and turning them into actionable design insights by employing a palette of qualitative and quantitative methods. He is an advocate of experience-centred design and passionate about answering the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’.

RSVP now!

Our Hosts

We’d like to thank Seek for being our hosts this month!
seek

March wrap-up: Learning from your customers via customer research

Posted on by
Reply

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!

Doing Research: Discovery & Validation – Jo Squire

thanks Jo for giving us an overview of the discovery and validation research #prodanon

A post shared by Product Anonymous (@product_anon) on

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.

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.

about to kick off katie’s talk about diary studies and how she used slack #prodanon

A post shared by Product Anonymous (@product_anon) on

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:

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!