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!

There are many user research methods one can use, and there are even more variations and names for them. But regardless of what name they’re given, methods should be chosen that are suitable for the situation at hand.

In this article I give a quick overview of the methods I commonly use, broken down in to main categories:

• Direct user contact—where the researcher does very much interact with users, or members of the audience as I prefer to call them
• Indirect user contact—where the researcher does not actually interact with members of the audience

The list is by no means exhaustive but it gives a good indication of the breadth and depth of methods that can be employed in user research.

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On Friday I presented with my colleague Alun Machin at the first day of Oz-IA 2009, the 4th Australian Information Architecture conference. It was a great day, with good company to keep us talking and some interesting stuff to keep us thinking. The venue was quite good too, my first time at Star City Convention Centre as it happens.

Unfortunately I couldn’t make it for the second day of the conference due to family commitments, which is a shame since the programme looked even better for the Saturday!

Our presentation on our new SuperRacing site (not yet live at the time of writing thissite is now live) went down well considering we had to cram everything we wanted to talk about into 25 minutes. The slides are shown below.

After two conference presentations in one week, it’ll be a while before I make another appearance, not to mention that I’ll be pretty brain dead for a while after the new baby arrives.

Today I gave a talk entitled Prioritising user experience at Ark Group’s Information Architecture – Designing and managing information structures for improved web access and usability conference.

I tried to make the topic a bit more interesting (read controversial) and I think it went quite well.

I covered two main topics, firstly I outlined why I think user experience (UX) should be prioritised over information architecture (IA), and then I discussed prioritising UX within the organisation.
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At this year’s Oz-IA conference I’ll be presenting a short session entitled Bringing them online: using design research to identify online opportunities with my colleague Alun Machin.

It’s all very hush hush at the moment because we’re operating under an embargo, but the general gist of it is how user research can inform the design process for a product (in this case a website) that pertains to an activity that is normally an offline experience.

We’ll talk about how we identified the audience’s “information ecosystem” and found an opportunity for our website to fit in with that in a useful way.

We’ll also talk about the very different groups within that audience and how we catered for each.

Alun will then talk about the transition into design and go through the process we followed.

And if all goes to plan we’ll be able to unveil the new website resulting from all this work!

All this in 25 minutes, including questions :)

Update: if you promise to come along and watch our preso you can use this discount code: PK0265. Use it to get $100 off when you register for OZ-IA.

I’m very pleased to have my first article How to combine multiple research methods: Practical Triangulation published on Johnny Holland. Here’s a taste:

All research methods have their pros and cons, the problem comes when you rely on just one method. I’m often disappointed when UX and IxD practitioners describe the research they do, and it’s obviously very one dimensional. They only do surveys, for example. Or they only do usability testing at the end of the project (it’s quite alarming but this practice does continue).

…

This is where the concept of “triangulation” comes into its own. Also known as “mixed method” research, triangulation is the act of combining several research methods to study one thing. They overlap each other somewhat, being complimentary at times, contrary at others. This has the effect of balancing each method out and giving a richer and hopefully truer account.

This will of course be one of the many topics I will be covering in my full day workshop on design research methods for UX practitioners at UX Australia 2009 – a 3-day user experience design conference to be held next week (26-28 August 2009) in Canberra (Australia).

I’m very happy indeed to announce that my Research methods for user experience design workshop has been added to the UX Australia program (workshops held Wednesday 26th of August in Canberra).

I’ve revised key aspects of the workshop, leveraging the experiences from some recent projects as examples, and allocated a full day. I’m looking forward to this!

What’s it all about

User experience design, and user-centred design (UCD) in general, requires an understanding of users and their needs and designing with those needs in mind, balanced by factors such as business objectives and technical constraints. Without a solid understanding of these inputs into the process, design is blind.

“Design research” is the process of uncovering and understanding those needs, whether it be direct user research or other means of gathering requirements. Yet, even some experienced web designers, developers and UX practitioners don’t feel well-equipped to take on the research aspects of their projects.

In this one-day workshop, Patrick Kennedy will present the fundamentals of design research from the ‘user experience’ perspective. Specifically, the workshop will be conducted in the context of organising and designing information systems such as websites, intranets and software applications.

This workshop will introduce design research, explain the fundamental principles and teach some simple techniques. The aim is to give the audience a heads-up on the subject and point them in the right direction so they can integrate research into their own work or just better collaborate with design researchers.

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I spent today at Ark Group’s Strategically Managing Intranet Developments conference, which I blogged about before.

There were some good things being said, and by real people who have done the hard yards. They’re not “industry luminaries”, but people out there in the trenches working out how to create effective intranets. Grounded and real are two words I would apply to the conference.

Then there was my presentation, a tad more abstract, but I felt it went well. Slides below.

I felt compelled to steer my presentation towards audience participation, if only because of the collective knowledge in the room; about half the room were presenting at the conference so I was learning as much, if not more, than I was dishing out. That’s the downside of being a consultant, you rarely get that rich experience that in-house staff have. Some great examples were offered by the audience, complementing my own examples.

There were one or two people twittering, you can follow the conversation on #smid.

Happy to hear your comments on my slides, either here or on slidehsare.

There is a difference between your target audience (who you want to reach) and your user-base (who actually uses your website). At least that’s the mental model I’ve always used when approaching web design. Let me explain, using a nifty Venn diagram:

The following notation goes with the diagram:

A = population of all web users
B = your target audience
C = your user-base (users of your website)
D = target audience using your website (B∩C if you’re a math geek)
E = target audience not using your website (B \ C)
F = users who are not in your target (C \ B)

This model provides a good platform for discussing strategies and tactics for a website. For example;

• If F is big you might be targeting the wrong people. Or your content is attractive to people other than who you want to attract.
• You generally want to shrink E and F and grow D, such that B and C become much more aligned. That is, the people using your website match your target audience.
• To shrink E (the people in your target audience who don’t use your website) you don’t have to spend money on marketing! You can create good content that attracts them, or to put it another way, “use SEO”.
• And, following on from that, if the content and functionality are well crafted you won’t grow F.

This last point is an interesting one, and it’s something that isn’t necessarily clear to some in this industry.

Case in point, I was recently involved in a conversation where a website owner told me her organisation didn’t know who their audience is. Not just their users (C), but their target audience (B)! The distinction between the two, as “my model” above describes, is that people actually using your website are at most a subset of who you’re targeting (at worst they’re completely different).

The fact that these two groups are different isn’t uncommon, nor is it unusual to not have a good idea of who the people using your website are (you might have analytics that tell you what they do but still not know anything about them). But it’s kinda scary to not even know who you’re targeting—who you’re trying to communicate with—other than “people who use the web”. This is wrong on so many levels! How are we supposed to create useful content for that? How are we supposed to design an effective user experience for “anyone”?

So, I guess it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise after that, when there seemed to be no recognition that there are people out there not using the site who could be. This gap between users and target audience is full of your potential customers (E). These are the people who you can “win”. So how do you do it? I thought it was logical, you create something those people want. Quite literally, if you build it (good content), they will come.

I was told that trying to gain more users (grow E) wouldn’t happen because there was no budget for marketing. OK, but wow about just creating better content?! Do a bit of research, find out what that untapped vein are interested in. I may be delusional but if you have to spend big on marketing to trick people to use your website, there’s nothing worth using on that website. OK maybe that’s a bit harsh but you catch my drift. Marketing can help, for sure, but it’s not the only answer nor is it the most direct solution.

Thoughts?

I’m looking for thoughts, suggestions, references regarding the topic of using “intermediaries” in user research. Whilst purists would argue you should not talk to one person about what another person would do/say/think, in practical terms sometimes that’s all you have to work with.

Personally, I have found that there is often a key person in an organisation that is able to speak with great insight into a particular audience group. For instance, a call centre representative who deals with customers day in and day out, can tell you quite a lot about customers.

I wouldn’t rely solely on this source, but included it as part of my triangulated approach to investigating the target audience.

But what are the caveats? Where is the line after which it’s bad practice? What are your experiences (good and bad)?

Update: I don’t think many people share my terminology wrt “intermediary”. Perhaps “second hand information” is more appropriate. What else do people call this?