USER RESEARCH

Qualitative vs Quantative Research

• People, associate the word research with science and

objectivity

• The current notion or prevailing concept of valid research

only that yields quantitative data.
Qualitative Research

• Understand Existing products, and how they are used

• Technical, business and environmental contexts

• Constraints, Vocabulary and other social aspects of the

domain in question
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

• Empowering management to make more informed decisions

about product design issues that would otherwise be based on
guesswork or personal preference
Other benefits of Qualitative Research
• Faster
• Less expensive
• More flexible
Question that leads to superior design

• What problems are people encountering with their

current systems.

• what the product hopes to do?

• Into what broader context in people’s lives does the

product fit and how?

• What are the basic goals people have in using the

product, and what basic tasks help people accomplish
them?
Types of qualitative research
• Stakeholder interviews

• Subject matter expert (SME) interviews

• User and customer interviews

• User observation/ethnographic field studies

• Literature review

• Product/ prototype and competitive audits

Stakeholder Interviews

• Start by understanding the business and technical context

• Common understanding among the design team,

management and engineering teams.
Stakeholder - Definition

Any one affected by the outcome of the project or actual

product itself is known as the stakeholder
Stakeholder Interview
• Managers
• Engineers
• Sales people
• Marketing people
• Design people
How to conduct interview?

• Interviews of stakeholders should be held before user

research.

• Interviews should be one-on-one

• Optimum duration should be of an hour.

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?

• What are the stakeholders’ perceptions of the user?

Stakeholder Interviews

Understanding these issues help you to better serve your

customer, as well as the user of the product.

Builds consensus internally for decision making, and

builds credibility for design team.
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

• You will want access to SMEs throughout the design

process
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
• Who make the decision to purchase the product.
User and Customer

• Consumer domain
• Customer are same as user

• Enterprise/Business domain
• Customer and user represent different groups of people
User and Customer

It’s important to understand customers and their goals in

order to make a product viable.
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

• Reasons and problems behind product suggestions and
ideas
Interviewing User
• Different type of users
• Current users
• Potential 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

• A basic understanding of the users current tasks

• A clear understanding of user goals

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
• Usability study results
• Customer support data
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
• Expert review of product interfaces and to make
comparisons.
Common Issues in Software Engineering
• Users cannot articulate their needs

• Software engineers complain of changing requirements

• Software engineers don’t respect users

• “users are a pain”
The Solution: Ethnographic Field Studies
• One-on-one interviews
• Directed ethnographic interview techniques

• Observing users (Work/lifestyle observation)

• Immersive observation
User-Centered Design (UCD) Approaches
• User-centered design approaches (a philosophy)
• Involves finding out about users, their goals and tasks
• Involves users in development process

• Principles of UCD
• Early focus on users and tasks
• Empirical measurement
• Iterative design
User-Centered Design Approaches
• A.k.a. Naturalistic Observation
Ethnography
• Branch of anthropology (a social science)

• Literally means “writing the culture”

• Deals with scientific description of individual human

societies

• In anthropology
• Ethnography understands behaviors and social rituals of entire
culture

• In human-computer interaction
• Ethnography understands behaviors and rituals of people
interacting with individual computer-based products
Ethnography Framework

• Structures presentation of ethnographies

• Enables designers to use efficiently use ethnographic

data
Dimensions of Ethnography Framework
• Distributed Coordination
• Focuses on distributed nature of work

• Plans and Procedures

• Focuses on organizational support for work

• Awareness of Work
• Focuses on how people keep themselves aware of other people’s
work
Contextual Inquiry
• An ethnographic interviewing technique

• Based on observing and asking user questions

• Based on master-apprentice model of learning

• Based 4 principles
Principles of Contextual Inquiry
• Context

• Partnership

• Interpretation

• Focus
Principles of Contextual Inquiry
• Context
• Observe in normal working environments

• Partnership
• Adopt collaborative tone

• Interpretation
• Analyze and interpret data, but verify assumptions

• Focus
• Subtle direction of interviews
Improving Contextual Inquiry
• Shorten the interview process
• 1 hr-long instead 1-day long interviews

• Use smaller design teams

• Perform sequential interviews with same team

• Identify goals first

• Identify and prioritize goals, then relate tasks

• Look beyond business contexts

• Use in consumer domains
Preparing for Ethnographic Interviews

• Need to capture entire range of user behaviors

• Identify diverse sample of users

• Create a hypothesis that identifies users to interview

The Persona Hypothesis
• Primarily based on behaviors

• Also considers target markets and demographics

• Product domain also considered

• Business user behavior different then that of consumer users

• Addresses at a high level:

• Who might use this product?
• How would their needs and behaviors might vary?
• Ranges of behavior and types of environments?
Roles in Business and Consumer
Domains
• User types vary based on needs and behaviors in
different domains (business, technical, consumer)

• Roles
• Common sets of tasks and information needs related to distinct
classes of users

• Business and technical contexts

• Roles often map to job descriptions

• Consumer contexts
• Roles map to lifestyle choices
Behavioral Variables
• Distinguish users based on their needs and behaviors
(e.g., e-commerce)
• Frequency of shopping (frequent—infrequent)
• Desire to shop (love—hate)
• Motivation to shop (bargain hunting—searching for just the right
item)

• User types defined by combination of behavioral variables

Demographic Variables
• Make use of demographic data (from market research
data)
• Age, location, gender, income

• Identified through user data

Domain Expertise vs. Technical Expertise
• Domain expertise
• Knowledge of a specialized subject pertaining to a product

• Technical expertise
• Knowledge of digital technology
Environmental Variables
• Company size (small – multinational)

• IT presence (ad hoc – draconian)

• Security level (lax – tight)

Creating an Interview Plan
• Create an interview plan based on persona hypothesis

• Explore all possible variables in 4-6 interviews

• Map variables to interview screening profiles

• An interviewee might cover a number of variables
• E.g., young female office worker, 20 years old, university educated,
loves to shop (this covers variables of age, gender, education,
designation, desire to shop, etc.)