Farhan Aadil
COMSATS Institute of Information Technology
Lecture 19
User Research
In the Last Lecture
• Goal directed design process
• Software development process
• Detail of design process
In Today’s Lecture
• Research techniques
Qualitative vs Quantative Research
Qualitative Research
• Understand Existing products, and how they are used • Technical, business and environmental contexts
Help in design projects
• Helps to identify the patterns of behaviour.
• Helps the progress of design team
– Providing credibility and authority to design team
– Uniting the team with a common understanding of domain issues and user concerns
Other benefits of Qualitative Research
• Faster
Question that leads to superior design
• What problems are people encountering with their current was of doing what the product hopes to do?
• Into what broader context in people’s lives does the product fit and how?
Types of qualitative research
• Stakeholder interviews
• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
• User and customer interviews
• User observation/ethnographic field studies
• Literature review
Stakeholder Interviews
• Start by understanding the business and technical context
Definition
Stakeholder Interview
• Managers • Engineers • Sales people
How to conduct interview?
• Interviews of stakeholders should be held before user research. • Interviews should be one-on-one
Stakeholder Interviews
• What is the primary vision of the product from each stakeholder perspective?
• What is the budget and schedule?
• What are the technical constraints?
• What are the business drivers?
Understanding these issues help you to better serve your customer, as well as the user of the product.
Subject Matter Expert (SME) Interviews
• SME are also known as domain experts
• SMEs are expert users: they have management perspective.
• SMEs are knowledgeable, but they are not designers
User and Customer Interviews
• User and customer are two different groups
• User
– People who use the product and try to accomplish something with it.
• Customer
User and Customer
• Consumer domain
– Customer are same as user
• Enterprise/Business domain
Interviewing customers
• Their goals in purchasing the product • Their frustrations with current solutions
• Their decision process for purchasing a product of the type you are designing
• Their role in installation, maintenance, and management of the product
• Domain-related issues and vocabulary
Interviewing User
• Different type of users
Interviewing User
• Problems and frustrations with the product
• The context of how the product fits into their lives or workflow • Domain knowledge from a user perspective
Literature Review
• Studying documentation which is relevant or pertains to the product or domain
• Business strategies document • Business plans
• Various policies, processes and procedures • Product marketing plans
• Data coming from market research • Technology specification
• White papers
• Business and technical journals articles • Competitive studies
Product and Competitive Audits
• Examine existing products and prototype • Examine competitive products
• Design team gets a feel for things • Source of information for question
• To understand the audit based upon heuristics
Contextual Inquiry
• Context
• Partnership
• interpretation
Improving contextual inquiry
• Shortening the interview process
• Using smaller design teams
• Identifying goals first
