{"id":20612,"date":"2020-08-08T14:38:35","date_gmt":"2020-08-08T13:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shopjessicabuckley.com\/blog\/?p=20612"},"modified":"2020-09-03T11:19:46","modified_gmt":"2020-09-03T10:19:46","slug":"the-basic-rules-of-ux-research","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shopjessicabuckley.com\/blog\/the-basic-rules-of-ux-research\/","title":{"rendered":"The basic rules of UX Research"},"content":{"rendered":"

In recent years, startups and big corporations increased their enthusiasm for research among the discovery phase of a new or existing product.<\/p>\n

Businesses understand that meaningful innovation requires learning and understand human-centered behaviours, not only are important the 5 W\u2019s<\/a>, we need to go deeper and empathise with the personas willing to use the product.<\/p>\n

Later on, in the ideation and sketching phase of a product we will play these personas, designers are empathetic amateur actors playing a given role.
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Empathy \u2014 the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here you can find the 7 golden rules to a better user research approach. This is a live document, so if you think we are missing any important rule, don\u2019t hesitate to contact me<\/a> to improve the content of this article.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

1. Don\u2019t design for you.<\/h2>\n
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\u201cDon\u2019t design what you like, design for your audience and what will best engage and communicate with them\u201d. \u2014 Marlys Arnold<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

Have you ever met a friend for a coffee and suddenly, in the middle of the conversation, with a bright spark in the eyes, your friend exclaimed: \u201cI have an idea that will be worth millions, this app will change the way we do laundry!\u201d<\/p>\n

You just heard the word million dollars and the first thing you imagine is yourself laying in a hammock in the Caribbean sea sipping a caipirinha while watching a group of dolphins on the horizon.<\/p>\n

Your friend keeps talking about how this new app offering laundry services to millennials for a fair monthly membership will change the way they do this tedious task. Your friend talks and talks and you, as a millennial, start to see all the flaws and black holes of the whole concept.<\/p>\n

After your coffee date, at the comfort of your sofa, you start thinking about the \u201cmillion dollars idea\u201d and you come to a conclusion, this is not going to work.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And this is exactly WHY<\/strong> discovery research was born.<\/p>\n

People constantly have million-dollar ideas that fit their individual needs or the collective needs they think the group has. But is the idea really worth a million dollars? The answer is\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t know yet, research will tell and data will prove\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we want to play mediums, the best way to predict the success or failure of a new product is research, this will tell you if that product is on our user\u2019s radar.<\/p>\n

Can you see all the power in research? I am sure you do.<\/em><\/p>\n

2.Learn, empathize, design.<\/h2>\n
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\u201cIt is relatively easy to design for the perfect cases, when everything goes right, or when all the information required is available in proper format.\u201d Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things.<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

Don Norman\u2019s infamous book \u201cThe design of everyday things\u201d was written back in 1988 when research was completely unknown by the mass, but in one of his most famous quotes we learn that design is easy if we have all the information required available.<\/p>\n

This last decade, the number of players on the playground has grown exponentially.<\/p>\n

In the past, big software corporations had no competition, but when the Google MarketPlace and the Apple Store were born in the late 2000\u2019s, thousands of startups were born, today we can count over one million startups worldwide<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This number means that in order to succeed and survive you need to differentiate yourself from the others by knowing what your user wants (to pay).<\/p>\n

3. Know your destination and set the scope of the project.<\/h2>\n
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\u201cIf I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on it, I would use the first 55 minutes determining the proper questions to ask\u201d \u2014 Albert Einstein.<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

It's Monday morning and your PM or PO shows up excited on a planning meeting and reveals Customer Service has uncovered a big problem on a basic feature of your company\u2019s product. She wants you to find a solution for it as soon as possible and you start shaking because you have no idea how to.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t freeze, we are here to help.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It is only after you have a well-defined goal that you will know what you need to learn. And you need a question before you can answer it. With right questions come right answers.<\/p>\n

Interviewing users is an art you can learn, but is necessary to spend time learning best practices, as Fabricio Teixeria states in his article \u201cAsking the right questions during user research, interviews and testing<\/a>\u201d start creating themes you want to uncover to continue breaking these themes in answerable questions.<\/p>\n

4. Quality is more important than quantity.<\/h2>\n
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\"I think there is a tendency in science to measure what is measurable and to decide that what you cannot measure must be uninteresting.\" \u2014 Don Norman.<\/p><\/span><\/blockquote>\n

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With the boom of data analytics, we tend to look at numbers and charts to reveal the flaws and strengths of a product. I am not saying this is wrong, but, it is always a but.<\/p>\n

At this initial stage where we need to discover how to find a design solution to a users problem, we better focus on undercover the flow that will lead the user achieve its goal.<\/p>\n

This is a scheme that usually helps my team formulate the right questions:<\/p>\n