User Experience is … User Research

How do we create something that is so meaningful that people hold it so close to them, that they can’t live without it?

In my first story ‘User Experience is …’ I promised that …

"over the course of a few stories, I’ll try and cover a few of the sciences we draw upon in our art as a creative community to create engaging experiences."

In my last story I talked around how User Experience is … Psychology. This time we venture out into the world of research.

In this fast paced digital age, there’s a rush to create something amazing, the silver bullet, the next new big thing, something that people hold dear in their lives and can’t live without. Think Amazon, What’sApp, Spotify, Netflix and Facebook (back in the day). The digital products that corner a market so tightly that they become engrained into people’s day.

But how do we know what that is? How do we create something that is so meaningful in today’s world that people will hold our digital product so close to them, that they can’t live without it?

Creating meaningful design requires us to understand people, how they are different, why they are different. But also understand what they will want to do and anticipate exactly when they want to do it, to provide them with a tool that makes their lives easier. But how can we do that?

We’re not Astrologists, tarot readers or clairvoyants. We don’t have a mystic ball like Mystic Meg. Heck, if we did we’d probably have won the lottery and not be designers … actually who are we kidding, design isn’t a job, it’s a way of life. So we’d still be trying to solve problems or wanting to create something.

The point here is that we can only understand others through spending time with them, talking to them and understanding them, that’s research. Hopefully you’ll get a basic understanding of the user research methods and techniques we use at Sainsbury’s with our colleagues and customers, in order to better understand them and provide the business with empathy for them and their needs, in this short 6 min story.

How research can help make the right product decisions

A design product is created following a series of decisions. Making decisions is relatively easy, make the right decisions is a little more tricky. Often we can only make the decision that is right at the time, with the knowledge we have in a lean and agile world. So making sure the right decisions get made in organisations can be tricky. But take heart. You’ll have more influence by taking the opportunity to understand the organisation’s motivations, colleagues and customers.

Research can take opinions, assumptions and stereotypes and find the golden nuggets of truth. Providing everyone with the a shared insight to feel comfortable making the right decisions, at any level. These decisions become no brainers and common sense, due to insight the research delivers, the empathy it provides and the problems it unearths.

Design research comes in many forms:

Pure, basic or fundamental research has the aim to improve understanding or enable better prediction. It fills the gaps in knowledge to provide a greater appreciation of a subject by uncovering new facts or fundamental principles.
Applied research is used to solve a specific, practical problem of an individual or group, towards a real world goal. This type of research is aimed at finding solutions to solve scientific problems or develop technology.
Design research started off as the study of practising design, it’s purpose and processes. Today design research is normally referred to as part of the work itself in order to provide a sensible and meaningful design solution.

Research comes from the world of scientific enquiry and academia, where it’s used for systematic inquiry and so, as you’d expect, comes with some guide rails and a process to follow. This provides us with a solid scientific method into our creative arsenal.

Insight driven approach

Whether the research requires a month or a single morning, following the same process will ensure solid insight from your efforts:

Define the problem. Just as a solid design solution needs a problem to solve, a useful research study depends on a clear problem statement. The research should provide a gap in knowledge, but what is that gap?
Select the approach. Your problem statement will help point towards a general type of research. If your question is about users, you’ll need to talk to them, or see how they are using something (ethnography). If you’re looking at an existing or potential design solution, you’ll be evaluating, or validating some assumptions. Take a look at the diagram below which shows how Sainsbury’s approaches this and uses different methods at different times and in different scenarios.
Plan and prepare for the research. Sketching out a plan and anticipating the inevitable and also the unexpected can leave you as cool as a cucumber in front of the research participants and leave you in control of the session, enabling you to focus on the key questions, guiding conversations and achieving the outcome of the session.
Collect the data. OK it’s the day of the research and you’re in front of the participants. Think about how are you going to record the responses?How can you make it easier on your participants and yourself to record the responses quickly and accurately whilst concentrating on the conversation?
Understand the data. Getting back to the office, you’ll need to collate all the information. You’ll need to download, view and review, to understand and analyse what was said, how and when in order to start to pull out themes and common problems. You’ll have loads of conversations running around in your head. You’ll have so much insight that your desk is overflowing and you won’t know what to do with it. But breathe, take a step back and start to pull it all together and understand it more, so you (and more importantly others) can make sense of it! Sharing these insights is the reason for starting the research, so take your time to make sure you’re able to pull out concrete themes that are evidence based and you’re able to share these around the business to drive traction on doing the right things.
Report the results. Providing that your outcome is concrete and backed by good evidence showing your findings in a easily tangible and digestible way in a visible location is far superior to a lengthy written report or set of slides that goes ignored. Make sure you capture the original brief, goals, methods, insights, summary and recommendations. It can be tempting to share these in a meeting or through conversations, but you’ll need them to evidence design work and to refer back to.

And lastly, I’ll finish on a quote from Jane Fulton Suri, Creative Director at IDEO:

Design research both inspires imagination and informs intuition through a variety of methods with related intents: to expose patterns underlying the rich reality of people’s behaviours and experiences, to explore reactions to probes and prototypes, and to shed light on the unknown through iterative hypothesis and experiment.
Jane Fulton Suri, Creative Director at IDEO

Other resources

As mentioned design research isn’t anything new. Design research started off as the study of design itself, its purpose and processes. These days it’s more popularly known as part of the design process. If you want to find out more, why not check out these links:

So there’s a quick skip through user research, by no means comprehensive but hopefully a good quick insight. But for me, I’m going to be turning my head back to Psychology and focussing in on the specific area of Behavioural Economics and how this can be used in User Experience. Looking at how Experience is … Behavioural Economics.

Originally written as part of the ‘User Experience is …’ series for UX Collective.