Summary and Schedule
User Experience Research (UXR) is an essential part of improving how software works for the people that use it. The ‘User Experience’ is the subjective experience in which humans interact, understand and manipulate information and interfaces. Research is investigating and interpreting those experiences of the users, from their own perspectives and then applying those learnings to the software to make it work well for the people using it. People all use software in different ways, with different intentions and purposes at different paces. Learning how to do UX Research helps creators of software to think outside their own experiences and include those of a wide range of users.
There might be new terminology or new ways that words and terms are used in these lessons. Please refer to the Glossary which contains words and their meaning in the context of software design.
Prerequisites
To successfully complete this workshop you will need:
- Digital or physical place to take notes and write documents.
- (Optional) Your own scientific software to focus your work on in a ‘repository’ or location where you can write information.
- (Optional) a spreadsheet creation and maintenance software or another way to store, label and categorise qualitative and quantitative data.
This lesson does not require any technology or software.
| Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 1. Introducing User Experience Research and Design |
What is user experience research? What is user experience design? How can user experience research help solve usability and user problems and difficulties in software? How can user experience research be done in an effective and lean way in scientific software? |
| Duration: 00h 30m | 2. Choosing a research method for design |
What distinguishes any method from another, e.g. are there different
user experience method types? How will learners know which methods are the right ones for their user experience research? What ethical considerations do learners need to take into account when choosing a user experience method? How can a user experience research plan affect method selection? |
| Duration: 04h 30m | 3. Keeping track of user data and OSS |
How can I be sure I’m storing data about people securely? What ethical considerations should I have when doing user experience research and how does that work with my scientific research? What are systems and processes for tracking user experience research? How should I organise my notes to remain open and understandable? How can I ensure my user experience research is made as openly accessible as possible? |
| Duration: 07h 10m | 4. Preparing your rapid usability test |
What are usability tests and when are they used? When should a rapid usability test be used? What tasks or prompts should participants complete during the usability test? How do you define success criteria for each usability test task? What should be included in a usability test script? |
| Duration: 08h 30m | 5. Preparing your interview study |
What are interview studies and when are they used? What materials do I need to prepare before conducting an interview? What should be included in an interview protocol? What are the risks I should consider before conducting an interview study and how do I proactively mitigate them? |
| Duration: 09h 50m | 6. Preparing your rapid usability test |
What are usability tests and when are they used? When should a rapid usability test be used? What tasks or prompts should participants complete during the usability test? How do you define success criteria for each usability test task? What should be included in a usability test script? |
| Duration: 11h 10m | 7. Recruiting participants |
How do I develop an appropriate recruitment strategy based on the chosen
target user audience? How do I find users that I don’t have a connection with already? How do I manage scheduling and how to coordinate user experience research sessions? How do I decline users that do not meet my requirements as a chosen user audience? |
| Duration: 12h 30m | 8. Conducting Interviews |
How do I know if a user is telling me everything they think
honestly? When and why should a user experience researcher go ‘off script’ and improvise questions during an interview? How to balance what a user experience research wants to learn with how much time is optimal for questions? How can I tell if questions are getting useful and relevant answers? How do you know when you have enough data? |
| Duration: 15h 30m | 9. Conducting a rapid usability assessment |
How do I better understand what a user is thinking or expecting as they
progress through a task? How do I support users to move through blocks and errors without offering the solution and biasing their task? How can I observe task completion and also take notes? |
| Duration: 16h 50m | 10. Interpreting results |
When do I start assessing and making informed decisions from the
data/insights from user experience research? How do I quickly but effectively label, define, sort and summarise my data? Who could I involve in user experience research data and how to go about that? How might I structure informed design decisions/assertions based on my data? When do I stop interpreting data and collecting data? |
| Duration: 20h 50m | 11. Connecting the dots and next steps |
How do I present my results to my stakeholders and the open community?
Are there differences in how I should present my results? How can I start to prioritize my results with what to focus on and how to communicate that? What resources are out there to help guide changes? How can I make a case to continue user experience design to funders? |
| Duration: 22h 10m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
This lesson does not require any specific technology or software but you can find some recommendations in the above prequisites. Much of this lesson is about exploring users, design and usability and understanding how to apply what you learn about design and from users to improvements and changes to your scientific/research open source software. You can find plenty of resources across the internet and beyond on how to learn about, and perform good usabilitya nd user experience research. The lesson content here, will be grounded in scietific and research related examples. As the curriculum progresses, we’ll explore some of the unique challenges that scientific/research open source software has in regards to design topics.
Data Sets
There are no data sets created currently for this lesson. If they are created, you will find them here.
Software Setup
Details
There are no unique set up requirements for different operating systems for this lesson. If this changes, you will find details here.