The User Experience Team of One

by Leah Buley

  4. Plan outputs.

  Finally, for each area that you’d like to research further, think about what form your evidence will take (for example, presenting and distributing new personas).

  Tips and Tricks for Learning Plans

  • Seek feedback. It’s one thing to write a plan. It’s another thing to get support to execute that plan. Share your plans with the team and your supervisor, and invite their feedback. They may encourage you to slim down your ambitions. That’s okay. That’s really an aid toward greater focus. Encourage and incorporate this feedback.

  • Revisit from time to time. Consider revisiting your learning plan at regular intervals (annually, for example) to keep it fresh. This periodic update is quite important. It’s not uncommon for companies to have some research that was done years ago that they’re using to inform future design decisions. But users, the products they use, and the technological landscapes in which they operate may have changed a lot in the intervening years. Take time now and again to reassess your working assumptions about user behavior and see if it’s time to revalidate or update them.

  • If you work remotely... You may want to brainstorm methods that are easier to conduct remotely, such as phone interviews or remote usability tests. See Nate Bolt’s excellent book on remotely usability testing for specific ideas: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/remote-research/.

  METHOD 8

  Guerilla User Research

  What concerns are top of mind for users? How do they really behave? How are people using your product today?

  There is one key requirement of user research, and it’s simple but not always easy: You have to actually talk to users. It doesn’t have to be a lot of them. Even just two or three is better than none at all. In guerrilla user research, you make it a priority to talk to and learn from at least a few users, firsthand and by whatever means necessary. Guerrilla user research can take any number of forms, from calling a user on the phone to approaching people in a coffee shop.

  Average Time

  About two days

  • 3–4 hours to figure out where to go to find users and write your research goals

  • 3–4 hours in the field, talking to users

  • 4–6 hours to mine your data

  Use When

  • You’re forming goals and priorities for design and feel that you need grounding in an understanding of user goals.

  • The team is making decisions for the product without any primary or firsthand knowledge of user needs. (You know this is happening when you find yourself in stalemate design arguments, or when you see people rationalizing product choices by speculating how a fictitious user, or even they themselves, would use the product.)

  Try It Out

  1. Think about your target users.

  Start by asking yourself whom you’d like to talk to and how. Think about what characterizes your users. How old are they, on average? What kinds of behaviors and interests might they have? Where might they live and work? How do they spend their free time? Once you have a basic idea of whom you’re looking for, think about where this type of person might be likely to spend his or her time. If it’s the type of situation or place that you could easily get access to, go there and ask the random people you meet if they’d be willing to participate in a short study. For example, let’s say your target customer is creative freelancers. Creative freelancers are known to spend lots of time working in coffee shops. So you would plan to spend an afternoon in a coffee shop, politely asking people you see working on their laptops if they would be interested in doing a short user study.

  2. List your research questions.

  Think about what you’re trying to learn from your users and list your questions. Articulate why you’re doing this work and what you hope to learn from it. Do a mind map to get your questions out of your head and onto paper or a white board (see Figure 6.3). To do a mind map, start by writing the topic in the middle (in this case, “user research questions.”) Now, when you think about your user research questions, what are the first things that come to mind? Write those around the central topic and connect them to the center with a line. For each branch, repeat this process until you can’t think of anything else that you want to learn from your users.

  FIGURE 6.3

  A sample mind map.

  3. Go into the field.

  For the research session, ideally meet with the user in his own environment: work, or home, or somewhere he spends a lot of time. Ask him to show you as much as he is comfortable sharing about what’s relevant and important in his own environment. If he’s okay with it, take pictures or videos to document what you see as visceral artifacts to remind you of this person and the things you learned about him. During your conversation, be sure you’re covering all the research questions that you listed in step 2.

  4. Mine the data for insights.

  After you’re done with your research interviews, spend some time reviewing your notes from all the interviews and looking for the answers to those questions that you listed at the beginning.

  Tips and Tricks for Guerilla User Research

  • Use your organization. Are there existing channels within the organization that afford direct access to your customers? Sales teams and support teams often have direct connections with customers, and they may be able to put you in touch with some of them. Another good place to connect with users is at industry-specific events or conferences. Or, if there are existing communications that are regularly sent to customers (for example, marketing emails, newsletters, and so on), see if you can arrange to slip a sentence or two into one of those communications inviting customers to participate in a research study. Or, if your organization uses Twitter or Facebook, send out a call for volunteers that way.

  • Use your network. If you’re having trouble finding good research participants, send out an email to your friends and colleagues saying that you’re looking for a person who fits this particular type of profile for some research that you’re conducting. Often, the people in your community will have friends and acquaintances that fit the bill, and they can put you in touch with them.

  • Get their consent. An important bit of housekeeping before any research interview is to inform the research participant of how you will be using this research and get her official permission. This is called informed consent. Figure 6.4 shows a standard template that you can use to cover both you and your research subject.

  • Ask open-ended questions. There is an art to user research. The goal is getting people to open up and share relevant information about themselves without leading them into answers. One technique that helps is to ask open-ended questions—questions that require more than a single word answer. Open-ended questions begin with words like “why” and “how.” Avoid starting questions with words like “did” or “was.” When in doubt, employ this powerful one-word sentence: “Why?”

  • Ask about past events. Another technique for getting rich information without leading users to predetermined answers is to ask them to recall or remember events from their own lives. (For example, “tell me about the last time that you took a picture on your phone.” Or, “tell me about the last time you bought a car.”) Ask people to recall the experiences chronologically, which can help them remember specifics that they might otherwise gloss over. The journey line is a simple pen-and-paper technique that you can do with users to facilitate this type of chronological conversation (see Figure 6.5).

  FIGURE 6.4

  A standard informed consent template.

  • A picture speaks 1,000 words. When sharing what you learned, include choice photos and audio clips to illustrate key concepts and bring the voice of the user to life.

  • Get into their environment. The things that people do and keep in their environment and the hacks they’ve created are often the biggest source of realization and inspiration for UX practitioners. For example, UX practitioners for a property website went into people’s home to watch them searching for propert
y on the Web. They discovered that many people were copying and pasting URLs of property they liked into separate Word documents to find them again later or send a complete list by email. This led them to design a “favoriting” feature with email capabilities.

  • Offer compensation. People are often more willing to give you their time and insights when they are rewarded for doing so. Offering some form of compensation up front as a thank you for their time generally increases your odds of finding willing research participants. What you give them doesn’t have to be a lot. Depending on how much time you need, a nominal gift card may be enough.

  FIGURE 6.5

  A research participant completing his journey line.

  • Interview tips:

  • Be confident. If you seem like you know what you’re doing, it will put your interviewee at ease.

  • Explain what’s going to happen. Tell them why you’re doing your research. Explain what kinds of questions you’ll be asking. Tell them what’s required of them. Let them know how long it’s going to take.

  • Allow silence. Give them time to think about your questions before answering. Resist the urge to fill in silence by reframing questions or suggesting possible responses. Be careful not to finish their sentences.

  • Memorize a few sentences that will keep the conversation going. For example, “That’s interesting. Tell me more.” “Say more about that.” “What’s the reason for that?” “How come?” “Why?”

  • Get people to tell you their stories and show you their things.

  • If you work remotely... Do this where you live, and aim to take lots of videos and photos to share with the rest of your team. If traveling to a location where your colleagues are is an option, take advantage of it and conduct some guerilla interviews with the members in tow. Research insights are always more profound for those who have witnessed it firsthand.

  METHOD 9

  Proto-Personas

  How can you think empathetically about your customers’ needs, goals, and challenges when using your product?

  Proto-personas are a technique to provoke empathetic, customer-oriented thinking without necessarily requiring you to do exhaustive customer research or have loads of statistical data to underpin your thinking (see Figure 6.6). Proto-personas are inspired by the UX technique of a simpler name, personas. Personas are a time-tested tool of the user experience field. A persona is a composite picture of a collection of users boiled down into one relatable, human profile. A persona is usually presented as an individual person with a name, a face, and a backstory. Personas usually explain that person’s needs, values, goals, frustrations, and desires. Personas are made as human as possible to further enhance the sense that this is a real person with a messy life and quirky ways of coping with very recognizable human situations. A persona is a fictitious composite based on extensive user research that you or someone else has observed firsthand. The trouble is, creating good personas takes time and resources.

  Proto-personas are a modified version of personas that stimulate the same type of empathetic and user-oriented thinking, but with less investment in time. They can be created with the help of the cross-functional team, which makes them a quick and inclusive tool for turning on the user experience goggles. In essence, proto-personas are a persona hack that you create using whatever data you have available and with the help of the team. Whereas a classic persona is based on firsthand user research, a proto-persona is based on whatever insights you have, which can include secondhand research, or even the well-informed hunches of a team of people. (Of course, if you have firsthand research to refer to, that’s ideal.) Proto-personas are less scientific and rigorous than traditional personas, but they can be equally effective for helping a team shift into a more empathetic mindset about users’ needs.

  Average Time

  3–6 hours total

  • 2–4 hours prep time

  • 1–2 hours for the workshop

  FIGURE 6.6

  An example of a completed proto-persona.

  Use When

  • You have an unclear picture of your target user.

  • You find that you and the team talk about users and their motivations in generic and non-specific terms.

  • You sense that the team needs a more empathetic and human-centered way of thinking about users.

  Try It Out

  1. Plan a working session with the team.

  Schedule an hour or so for a working session and invite a cross-functional team to help you create the proto-personas. Since this is a group activity, the number of people involved matters. Aim for no fewer than 4 people and no more than 12. Any more and the group becomes a bit unwieldy. Consider including people who have direct access to customers (for example, sales people or call center representatives). They will have great firsthand insights about customers.

  2. Set expectations.

  Once you have everyone assembled, explain that thinking of users as individual people with unique needs helps you create products that are easy to use and respect your users’ time. Help them understand that UX is a frame of mind, and this activity will help get them in that frame of mind. Explain that what you are about to do is an unscientific technique that will nevertheless get everyone thinking differently about the people who use your products.

  3. Create teams.

  Organize the group into small teams of about three people. Ask each team to discuss what they know or suspect to be true about your users, and then focus in on one particular type of user that they want to develop as a proto-persona.

  4. Fill in basic information for each proto-persona.

  Give each team a poster-sized persona template and ask them to fill in the details of a fictitious but realistic person they might expect to use their product. Ask them to create a story for this person, including a name, where they live, what they do for a living, what frustrates them, what a day in their life looks like, and what they are doing before, after, and during the use of your product.

  5. Bring the proto-personas to life.

  Ask each team to add photos, quotes, and other forms of real-life “color” to their posters. For this, you can simply give them a stack of stock photos or a selection of magazines and have them pick images to represent their persona and what a day in their life might look like.

  6. Share and discuss as a group.

  After the teams have each assembled their posters, ask each one to share the story of their proto-persona. As a group, discuss your reactions to the proto-personas. What questions do the proto-personas raise that you might want to explore or research further? Discuss how you’d like to use these personas in the future and if there are any particular proto-personas that are especially relevant and effective in getting the team to think empathetically.

  Tips and Tricks for Proto-Personas

  • Base them on whatever research you have. If any pre-existing customer research exists, this can be a good starting point for your proto-personas. Gather any information that you have available about the different types of customers who use your products. Look for any market segment information, demographics, or customer support insights. If you don’t have any of that, simply start by talking with the team about what types of people use your products. Sales people or customer support people are often especially knowledgeable about customers and their goals and challenges.

  • Treat them as a hypothesis. After the exercise, look for opportunities to validate (or invalidate) the details in the proto-personas against data from the field. In other words, don’t let the process stop here.

  • Don’t confuse these with real personas. User research purists may have some concern about this method, because it’s not necessarily grounded in directly observed user research. Proto-personas are very useful for generating empathy, however, and the fact that they can be done in the course of a group activity makes them good for building interest and buy-in to provide a better experience to support users’ needs. However, if and when the opportu
nity to do real personas arises, jump at it.

  • If you work remotely... It would be difficult to approximate a proto-persona workshop remotely, but this type of exercise can still be a useful tool to do by yourself to guide you as you think about the design. If you’re not necessarily planning to share the proto-persona with others, you can also take a lower fidelity approach, like the one shown in Figure 6.7.

  FIGURE 6.7

  Here, notes from past research (in this case, individual interviews) are captured on Post-its and then compiled into a single profile.

  METHOD 10

  Heuristic Markup

  How does a user experience the product from beginning to end? Heuristic markups are inspired by heuristic evaluations. A heuristic evaluation is a fancy term for a review of a product to see how well it complies with recognized usability principles. In a typical heuristic evaluation, a user experience professional audits a product and identifies any parts that don’t conform to established standards and best practices. A heuristic markup is conceptually similar to a heuristic evaluation, but it places less emphasis on recognized standards and more emphasis on your own gut reactions and responses as you move through the product. A heuristic markup helps you tell the story of how a user might experience the product from start to finish (see Figure 6.8). In a heuristic markup, you start at the beginning of the product and record your thought process as you move through the experience. A heuristic markup is easy to do and surprisingly fun. Plus, taking the time to really notice what you notice is a good way to lift the goggles of familiarity.