UX research

Question 1

UX research

Answer 1

UX research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation and feedback. Your product design should be built upon research and facts, not assumptions. UX research aligns what you, as the designer, think the user needs with what the user actually needs.

Question 2

Branches of research

Answer 2

Foundational research (from the brainstorm phase),
Design research (from the design phase),
post-launch research (from the launch phase)

Question 3

Foundational research

Answer 3

Foundational research is always done before you start designing. Within the product development life cycle, foundational research happens during the brainstorm stage (stage one) to help you empathize with users, understand their needs, and inspire new design directions. During this stage, you will also make personas and user stories

Question 4

Research methods for conducting foundational research

Answer 4

Interviews
Surveys
Focus groups
Competitive audit
Field studies
Diary studies

Question 5

Interviews:

Answer 5

Interviews: A research method used to collect in-depth information on people’s opinions, thoughts, experiences, and feelings. You’ll often conduct interviews of your target users themselves.

Question 6

Focus groups:

Answer 6

Focus groups: A small group of people whose reactions are studied. For example, your focus group might bring together eight users to discuss their perspectives about new features in your design. A focus group is usually run by a moderator who guides the group on a certain topic of conversation.

Question 7

Surveys:

Answer 7

Surveys: An activity where many people are asked the same questions in order to understand what most people think about a product.

Question 8

Focus groups:

Answer 8

A small group of people whose reactions are studied. For example, your focus group might bring together eight users to discuss their perspectives about new features in your design. A focus group is usually run by a moderator who guides the group on a certain topic of conversation.

Question 9

Competitive audit:

Answer 9

An overview of your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.

Question 10

Field studies:

Answer 10

Research activities that take place in the user’s context or personal environment, rather than in an office or lab.

Question 11

Diary studies:

Answer 11

A research method used to collect qualitative data about user behaviors, activities, and experiences over time. Often, a user will log, or diary, about their daily activities and provide information about their behaviours and needs, which can help inform your designs.

Question 12

Design research

Answer 12

Within the product development lifecycle, design research happens during the design stage (stage three) to help inform your designs, to fit the needs of users, and to reduce risk. Each time you create a new version of your design, new research should be done to evaluate what works well and what needs to be changed.
In design research, your goal is to answer the question: How should we build it?
The most common method used to conduct design research is a usability study
Also:
A/B testing
Cafe or guerrilla studies
Card sorting:
Intercepts:

Question 13

Usability study

Answer 13

The most common method used to conduct design research is a usability study, which is a technique to evaluate a product by testing it on users. The goal of usability studies is to identify pain points that the user experiences with your prototypes, so the issues can be fixed before the product launches.

Question 14

A/B testing:

Answer 14

A research method that evaluates and compares two different aspects of a product to discover which of them is most effective. For example, you might have users evaluate two layouts for the homepage of your app to find out which layout is more effective.

Question 15

Cafe or guerrilla studies:

Answer 15

A research method where user feedback is gathered by taking a design or prototype into the public domain and asking passersby for their thoughts. For example, you might sit in a local coffee shop and ask customers if they would be willing to test your app design for a couple of minutes and provide feedback.

Question 16

Card sorting:

Answer 16

A research method that instructs study participants to sort individual labels written on notecards into categories that make sense to them. This type of research is largely used to figure out the information architecture of your project

Question 17

Intercepts

Answer 17

A research method that gathers on-site feedback from users as they engage in the activities being researched. Intercepts are often conducted in the field, so this type of research is often considered a subset of field research. An intercept study can provide quick, high-level feedback.

Question 18

Post-launch research

Answer 18

Post-launch research is done after the design is complete and your product has launched. Within the product development life cycle, post-launch research happens after the launch stage (stage five) to help validate that the product is meeting user needs through established metrics.
Did we succeed?

Question 19

Post-launch research mehods

Answer 19

Research methods you might use to conduct post-launch research include:

• A/B testing
• Usability studies
• Surveys
• Logs analysis: A research method used to evaluate recordings of users while they interact with your design, tools, etc.

Question 20

Empathy maps

Answer 20

An empathy map is a collaborative visualization used to articulate what we know about a particular type of user. It externalizes knowledge about users in order to 1) create a shared understanding of user needs, and 2) aid in decision making.
Empathy maps help designers understand their users’ needs and pain points. During the interviews, you’ll collect a lot of raw data. As you sort the interview data into each empathy map, try to identify the most important topics and details, rather than adding every aspect of the interview. Your completed empathy maps should give a clear and concise description of your user and their problems.

Question 21

One-user empathy maps

Answer 21

One-user empathy maps are empathy maps created directly from an interview with a single user,

Question 22

Aggregated empathy maps

Answer 22

Aggregated empathy maps that are created by combining the interview and empathy map data from multiple users who share similar needs, experiences, and goals. Aggregated empathy maps represent groups of users who interact with a product, and can be a good foundation for creating personas.
Once one-user empathy maps are created for each interview participant, the designer will combine the one-user empathy maps into aggregated empathy maps. This is done by combining similar thoughts and ideas expressed during the interviews into a single empathy map. These groupings can be made by identifying themes in participant responses.

Question 23

Steps for creating Empathy maps

Answer 23

Conduct interviews.
Review recordings and notes take during interview.
Review notes and create one-user empathy maps.
Then, they’ll sort the data into one-user empathy maps, one for each participant. Each map will show what the users said, thought, did, and felt during their interviews.

Question 24

Identifying themes in empath maps

Answer 24

Identifying themes can be done by sorting similar quotes and responses together into categories. This can even be done on sticky notes or a digital sticky note tool to help visualize the connections between responses. The wording of responses in the same theme don’t have to be identical, but there should be an overlap in the type of response, thought, or action being expressed.

Question 25

A user story

Answer 25

A user story is a fictional one-sentence story told from the persona’s point of view to inspire and inform design decisions.
a user story is a fictional one-sentence story told from the persona’s point of view to inspire and inform design decisions.
Remember, user stories are short and impactful, with a clear action and benefit. You can use this format to write a user story:

As a type of user (who), I want to action (what) so that benefit (why).

Question 26

Jobs-to-Be-Done

Answer 26

The Jobs-to-Be-Done framework is a representations of user needs born out of qualitative user research, such as field studies, interviews, and discount usability testing. It involves identifying for which goals customers “hire” your product (and, ideally, also finding out if there are competitor products that these users are ready to “fire”). Armed with this understanding, a product team can think about the nature of the users’ core problems and needs from a fresh perspective, and devise product features that solve that main need as best as possible.

Question 27

Personas

Answer 27

A persona is a fictional, yet realistic, description of a typical or target user of the product. A persona is an archetype instead of an actual living human, but personas should be described as if they were real people.
A persona is a singular user derived from these data ranges to highlight specific details and important features of the group.
We need all product-team members to empathize with users and be willing to go the extra step to develop something that will work for the actual users.

Question 28

Definition of a Persona

Answer 28

The description should be thorough, including details about the persona’s needs, concerns, and goals, as well as background information such as age, gender, behaviors, and occupation.
Should focus on those characteristics that impact what is being designed.

Question 29

When to Create Personas

Answer 29

Ideally, the persona-creation process should be a part of the research phase for a product or feature, before the actual design process starts
Personas must be based on user research in order to be at all accurate and representative of actual users of a product.

Question 30

Guidelines for Creating Personas

Answer 30

Common pieces of information to include are:

Name, age, gender, and a photo
Tag line describing what they do in “real life”; avoid getting too witty, as doing so may taint the persona as being too fun and not a useful tool
Experience level in the area of your product or service
Context for how they would interact with your product: Through choice or required by their job? How often would they use it? Do they typically use a desktop computer to access it, or their phone or other device?
Goals and concerns when they perform relevant tasks: speed, accuracy, thoroughness, or any other needs that may factor into their usage
Quotes to sum up the persona’s attitude

Question 31

1 job of a persona:

Answer 31

To make sure that all team members remember the users they’re building the product for.
Avoid adding extraneous details that do not have any implications for design. A lot of unessential details can overwhelm the relevant ones and make them harder to remember.

Question 32

Persona-Focused Design

Answer 32

The persona’s name acts as shorthand for the full set of attributes, desires, and behaviours that need to be considered when making design decisions.
When making design-strategy decisions, those functionalities that would most benefit a persona should inform which features to implement and prioritize.
You can’t design something to please everyone!

Question 33

Empathy Map Says quadrant

Answer 33

contains what the user says out loud in an interview or some other usability study. Ideally, it contains verbatim and direct quotes from research

Question 34

Empathy Map Thinks quadrant

Answer 34

ay special attention to what users think, but may not be willing to vocalize. Try to understand why they are reluctant to share — are they unsure, self-conscious, polite, or afraid to tell others something?

Question 35

Empathy Map Does quadrant

Answer 35

The Does quadrant encloses the actions the user takes. From the research, what does the user physically do? How does the user go about doing it?

Refreshes page several times.
Shops around to compare prices.

Question 36

Empathy Map Feels quadrant

Answer 36

Feels quadrant is the user’s emotional state, often represented as an adjective plus a short sentence for context. Ask yourself: what worries the user? What does the user get excited about? How does the user feel about the experience?

Impatient: pages load too slowly
Confused: too many contradictory prices
Worried: they are doing something wrong

Question 37

Capture who a user or persona is.

Answer 37

The empathy-mapping process helps distill and categorize your knowledge of the user into one place. It can be used to:
Categorize and make sense of qualitative research (research notes, survey answers, user-interview transcripts)
Discover gaps in your current knowledge and identify the types of research needed to address it. A sparse empathy map indicates that more research needs to be done.
Create personas by aligning and grouping empathy maps covering individual users

Question 38

Why Use Empathy Maps

Answer 38

Capture who a user or persona is.
Communicate a user or persona to others:
Collect data directly from the user.