user research: trying to answer the why and how questions aga szóstek(at)gmail.com
why doing user research in the first place?
- users have different goals than designers
- users do not care for design success
- there is more than one user per solution
- there is more than one solution per problem
traditional user research - formal - informative - answers - precision - understanding - raw data
generative methods - informal - inspirational - questions - ambiguity - empathy - interpretation
user research: an example
PhD project: Sebas1an Denef Promoters: David V. Keyson i Reinhard Oppermann
How do firemen deal with dangerous situations in the midst of the action? How could their actions be supported through interactive technologies?
OBSERVATIONS
TOOL ANALYSIS
ROLE PLAYING
BUILDING EMPATHY
using generative methods: an example
Welcome Experience at a telecom provider Aga Szóstek, Marcin Piotrowski, Joanna Kwiatkowska
first month with a telecom provider
provider
first impressions
user
trial period
uncertainty
building relationship
gaining trust
adjusting offer
explaining payment
upselling
partcipants - 20 persons (50% M, 50% F) - recruited at the door of the provider’s shop - committed to buy a postpaid plan - signing an agreement to participate
diary / blog study
love / hate letters
creative workshop
why and when traditional user research?
- works great for the defined design space - helps to objectify discovered phenomena - supports task oriented design - resolves interaction problems - focuses in iterative measurement of progress - enables comparison
why and when generative methods?
- high complexity of the design issues (so called: wicked problems)
- uncertainty what truly is the design challenge
- need for flexibility to approach the solution
- building empathy
who should participate?
snowball sampling: when you want to find users who have similar
interests, jobs or lifestyle
extreme case sampling: when you want to find users who are extreme
representatives of certain behaviours (e.g. firemen for a decision-taking study
homogenous sampling: when you want to find users who are very much
alike in a certain aspect
maximum variation sampling: when you want to find users who are very different
with respect to a certain aspect
convenience sampling: when you just want to find users
who are together for some reason (eg. a workshop) and agree to participate in the study
opportunistic sampling: when you just want to find
truly random users
references
Denef, S.; Keyson, D.; Oppermann, R. Rigid Structures, Independent Units, Monitoring: Organizing Patterns in Frontline Firefighting. In Proceedings of the 2011 SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Austin, TX, USA, 5–10 May 2011; pp. 1949–1958. Pallot, Marc, et al. "Living lab research landscape: From user centred design and user experience towards user cocreation." First European Summer School'Living Labs'. 2010.
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