Pat’s Point of View

I recently received an email from someone asking me for some advice on starting off in the field of user research field.

Hi Patrick,

I’m Hans, a technical writer from Zurich and wanted to say a quick hello.

I happened to visit your website and liked the article The 7 Stages of User Frustration :)

I have a interest towards user research and have been reading books.

I’m looking out for projects (websites or applications) where I could help with user research and data analysis. I was wondering how to get started in terms of skills required. I know it is not easy for people to entrust such an important activity to me. Could you help me with your suggestions?

Thanks,
Hans

I thought about how I would respond, but since this isn’t the first time I’ve been asked this question, I figured it might be helpful to respond in the form of a blog post for everyone to see.

I’ll start by saying that this is my take on how I do my kind of user research and how I think someone could help get themselves where I am.

What is user research?

While I teach whole workshops on the subject of user research, in essence it really is very simple. User research is about understanding an audience; what they need, what they want, what they think, how they interact with other people, information and information systems such as websites. And perhaps most importantly, for all of the above, it’s about why.

It’s a mixture of market research, psychology, sociology, anthropology and business analysis. You see, people are like onions; lots of different layers. Which layers you look at will depend on the research context. What do you need to understand about your users in order to meet your objective?

At the end of the day, the purpose of user research is to understand the needs of the users and how those needs might be satisfied. It’s the second half of that last sentence that is quite pivotal; you can learn a lot about what makes the users tick, but for most practical applications we need to be able to then design something. Thus, the term “design research” is often used as a synonym for user research in fields such as interaction design and user experience (UX), which is the field I work in.

Skills

There are of course many user research methods for you to master (which is no small accomplishment by the way). However, there are other skills you need as a user researcher.

I think the most important “skill” is to have an interest in discovering, learning, probing deeper. I’m not a strict methodologist, I rarely follow a rigid process for my work, but the curiosity and desire to discover the what, how and why has been an indispensable feather in my cap. You have to want to dig beneath the surface and find out about the people you’re researching. They’re not a faceless, anonymous, uniform mass of “users”. They don’t think like you, they don’t think like your organisation (or client) wishes they would, they don’t act the way that would be convenient for the UI designer or system architect. (Unless of course they do, but you won’t know that unless you go and find out.)

Facilitation and public speaking skills and very helpful. You need to be confident and commanding when necessary, such as when moderating a focus group, but also quiet and a good listener, such as when interviewing or observing. Confidence can be acquired, but being quiet and observant, not so easily. That’s why I think introverts make good researchers, they can sit and watch and listen, taking it all in rather than needing to talk a lot. However this may be me post-rationalising!

I’m good at taking notice of things about people and remembering faces (and the people attached to them!). I think I can “read” people well. And I’m pretty good at seeing connections between various traits, and indeed between people, identifying patterns in their personalities and behaviour. This is not to say I’m the world’s best researcher, just that I find these have been useful traits.

Learning from other fields

As you can see from my definition of user research above, I see it as having very fuzzy boundaries, with lots of overlap with other fields. This means there’s much to be learnt from people in other disciplines. This includes anthropologists, psychologists, sociologists, journalists, market researchers, technical writers, business analysts (BA) and industrial designers.

Research at its most basic, is about gaining insight. You choose something you want to better understand, then you go off and find out what you can about it. As you’d imagine this concept is pretty widespread, so you’ll find research expertise in lots of different places.

You can borrow techniques from these other fields, but probably more important when you’re starting out is being able to watch and learn from them. Shadow them, or perhaps some kind of mentoring relationship might work.

You then need to translate what you learn from these other fields and apply it to user research. This cross pollination has proven very useful for me.

Book learning

The overlap with other disciplines means there are lots of sources of information and insight. As Hans mentions, you can start by reading (actually not just start but all the way through your career).

Two good books to get you started with user research are:

• Don’t Make Me Think! by Steve Krug
• Observing the User Experience by Mike Kuniavsky

The first gives you the right attitude and approach to take, the second gives practical details on many research techniques.

Each of the disciplines mentioned in the previous section will no doubt have their own community, whether it be online or off. These communities are usually a great source of recommendations on books to read, but also for things like education, training, consultants. Look for mailing lists (such as anthrodesign) or face-to-face groups (such as UX book club).

I find these communities can be incredibly useful, especially if you’re new to their field and want to get up to speed. When I was getting established in this field, I made sure I did as many of these things as possible. I met people, talked about stuff, became part of the community.

Formal education

Is this necessary? I’m really in two minds about this topic. I certainly think that you can be a great user researcher but not have any formal education. Yet there are clear benefits to such an education. Everyone interprets and makes sense of what they see in research, from their own perspective—which is why it’s a good idea to have multiple researchers. I believe it’s useful to have an academic standpoint underpinning this perspective. For example, anthropology has several schools of thought that provide frameworks for analysing observed behaviour. This is a definite benefit, even if they reject that standpoint.

So, whether you want to do a university course is up to you. If you’re like me you won’t be able to find a degree or masters program that is focused enough, or flexible enough, to give you just what you want without lots of what you don’t want. In that case, more targeted training courses are the way to go. For example, earlier this year I did a one day course on multivariate data analysis to brush up on quantitative techniques. The course was part of the Australian Market and Social Research Society‘s (AMSRS) winter school, and a good example of utilising a complimentary field.

Other short courses you might want to look into, could include: facilitation skills, active listening, “story listening”, mentoring/coaching as well as courses specific to particular research methods.

Out-sourcing

Consultants and freelancers can be hired to get projects done, but you can also learn from them. You might go so far as to get them in purely to act as mentors. Some organisations have mentoring programs, such as the IA Institute. It is becoming more popular for consultancies who operate in this space, to offer mentoring as a service as opposed to just doing the work for their clients.

Going guerrilla

I don’t mean you should start wearing a Che t-shirt and ambushing your boss with demands for social reform and more involvement in user research projects, although that may very well work for you. What I mean is that there are some less traditional ways of building expertise and experience, to gain a foot hold in the field, whilst keeping your day job.

• One could be the literally use so-called “guerrilla” techniques: cheaper and less formal research methods. For example, doing research in-house rather than recruiting external participants. This might be enough to allow you to add on research to current projects or fit it in during “down time”.
• If your organisation already has a user research or UX capability, you might want to shadow a team member who is a more experienced researcher, this will be a good way to learn and start to get involved.
• You could start moonlighting by doing work on the side for your own clients, friends or family. I did this when I was really breaking through, supplementing my web design services with UX and user research.
• You could take part in crowdsource projects such as Drupal 7 UX.

Gaining trust

It’s interesting that Hans says “it’s not easy for people to entrust such an important activity to me”. First of all, if you’re in a position where your colleagues (especially senior stakeholders) think research is that important, then that’s an excellent start! Possibly the biggest problem with web UX is a lack of understanding or value in research. More often than not we have to fight to get the time and resources to do it (or do enough of it).

To answer Hans’ question though, their trust in you personally is something you can work on. Using some of the techniques I’ve described below, you can build up expertise and visibility which should convince others you can be trusted with the task.

Mixed methods

In terms of building trust when you’re doing user research, make use of triangulation or a “mixed method” approach. This essentially means using a few different forms of research to help balance out the risks associated with each. This gives increased confidence in the results, and thus in you.

For example, you could back up your user interviews with some third party statistics that related to the topic being studied. Secondary research of this nature, particularly when it is sourced from big players (eg academic or big consultancies like Forrester, Nielsen, Roy Morgan, NN/g) can really bolster confidence in your work and make important stakeholders into believers rather than ardent sceptics. Doing this might also help you build bridges with other departments such as marketing.

Starting from scratch

If your organisation has no UX or user research capability, you’ll need to engage in some self promotion and reputation building. Here are my tips:

• Show initiative by willing to learn (eg try things yourself, do training).
• Make yourself the resident expert on user research.
• Write book reports or do “brown bag” presentations to your colleagues on the books you’ve read.
• Create an internal newsletter or blog that allows you to send around links to pertinent articles. Compile a persuasive argument for why user research should be done, and for you to be involved.
• Represent your organisation at conferences, getting to know the experts in the field. Bring that knowledge back to your organisation, but also let everyone else know your organisation is serious about user research and that you’re the go-to guy (or gal).
• Make yourself the liaison for any external parties doing user research work (consultants, contractors etc).
• Invite guest speakers to come in and give a talk about UX and user research to your organisation. Make sure you’re the person they deal with.

All of this will, over time, mean your colleagues start to think of you when they think of user research. You can convert this association into permission; permission to get out there and do some research!

Then, do whatever small pieces of research you can, but make suggestions about further research that could be done and the benefits that this would bring—such as increased confidence in the results, increased clarity, increased depth or richness of information. This lets those who make the decisions know what the possibilities are. Back this up with a fairly concrete plan for the work: how much will it cost? how long will it take? how will it improve the work that is already being done?

If you’re a UX practitioner

If you’re a UX practitioner who doesn’t have much experience in doing research, I would recommend:

• Don’t get too hooked up on methodology.
• Let them talk! Don’t hound your research participants for feedback on a specific usability issue.
• Think about useful as well as usable, what does your audience need and what will they use?
• Use activities and design games to get info from users without grilling them.
• It’s not (just) usability testing, though that might form part of your research.
• Think critically, why has that person said that or reacted that way?

How I got started in user research

My first piece of user research involved card sorting. They were graphic cards, rather than text, showing different types of cars. This allowed me to get an idea of how people who didn’t know a lot about cars would classify the different styles (or “body shapes”) and how they might go about choosing the car that was right for them. This worked very well and allowed the design team to challenge the client’s view of how the vehicles in their range should be organised on the website. Their view was very much according to the automotive industry view of things which whilst technically correct, was at odds with how your average punter sees things. Using our research, we could think about better ways of communicating with website users.

It was far from a perfect project, I was operating with very little resources and looking back on it I can see there were many things I would differently now to improve the method. Yet the results were very useful and this led me to continue my shift from general web design into the field of UX and user research.

I took it upon myself to do this work—which I would now call design research—to help create the IA and UI. Nobody else in the team was doing it and I knew enough about cars to know that not everyone else knows that much about cars, so we needed to explore how regular people would group them and what they would call each group. Hence the card sorting.

I recruited participants within my company, I ran the sessions largely in my own time and learnt a lot of things as I went. I also read Krug.

I remember writing out scripts for exactly what I was going to say and setting up a makeshift observation room by using a video camera connected to a TV set by a very long cable (to no avail since nobody turned up to watch!).

Despite its shortcomings, all of this was noticed by those running the project, and by senior management. Soon “usability” made a regular appearance on client proposals, capability statements and project plans. I was encouraged to learn more and to improve the quality of what the team was producing.

Later in may career I was working as a consultant, which almost by necessity means I had to investigate and analyse before compiling recommendations—which is, in essence, research. I was spending a lot of time undertaking various kinds of research (user research, stakeholder research, usability testing etc) and less time designing and implementing, which meant a lot of practice with techniques such as interviewing, groups workshops, card sorting.

From then on, it’s been a matter of doing more projects; refining my approach, practising techniques, trying new methods and tools.

Above all, my ultimate piece of advice would be to just jump in and have a go; it’s easier than you probably think!

This entry was posted on Friday, December 18th, 2009 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Design research, User experience. If you enjoyed this post, you might also like to leave a comment, find out more about me or follow @patrickkennedy on Twitter.

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