Research
Research informs decisions.
User Research is a tool to confirm and reject assumptions, provide evidence for product direction, and most importantly inform decisions. Often times, user research is thought as the first step in the design process, a step to include before moving into other- pre planned- activities. However, User research should be considered a guiding step in the design process that informs stakeholders what activities should be invested in next. Not every design challenge requires the same process or solution.
Research is deployed in a variety of ways, but User Research is as simple as asking the right questions to the right people.
User Research should be actionable.
UX Designers must be able to quickly become experts of new industries, and it is the researchers job to turn user research into actionable information for stakeholders.
Research should be turned into actionable insights. These insights are often packaged as a presentation. This presentation needs to clearly communicate the the findings through informative quotes, summarizations, and themes (All of which can be linked back directly to the research.)
UX Designers need to be skilled communicators.
Whether utilizing methods such as these: stakeholder or user interviews, heuristic evaluations, site mapping, service safaris, user testing, research eventually needs to be explained to someone else. Being able to break information down and summarize it is an essential skill of the UX Designer.
Software that speeds up Research
- Optimal Workshop for collecting and sorting information
- Google Forms and Survey Monkey for distributing surveys
- Hot Jar for mouse tracking on websites
- XML crawlers for creating Site Maps
- Google Sheets for sorting and making sense of data
- Google Docs and Slides for creating supporting research documentation/ presentations.
