Introducing User Experience Research and Design
Choosing a research method for design
Motivation
- Being able to describe and articulate your open source science software’s functionality, limitations and intentions helps you to better define a specific user experience research goal.
- Themes and recurring details can help you identify what is important or meaningful in how you (and others) describe your open source science software.
Choose and find your target user audience
- Like defining your open source science software’s functions and goals, describing and defining the kinds of users and their needs, traits and expectations helps you to narrow your focus to types of users based on a needs and/or behaviour.
- There are resources that can extend this learning for you in the form of audience and stakeholder mapping exercises that explore more prompts for you to think about users.
- Staying away from broad generalisations of users and specifying what actions and behaviours the users have.
Identifying risks and ethics in user experience research
- Ethical considerations can be different depending on the kind of users you’re focusing on, the type of open source science project and what (if any) sensitive subjects might arise.
- Lean towards caution and comfort and make sure to adhere to any policies that you might be beholden to as per your institutional affiliation.
What user experience research methods are available to you?
- There are a long list of methods available to those that conduct user experience research.
- Using details from your open source science software definition, audience definitions and what goals you have to learn about can help you narrow down what methodology you want to use.
- If In doubt, default back to a method you feel confident about and comfortable with. Getting the method process 100% right isn’t as important and practicing and gaining experience doing user experience research.
Keeping track of user data and OSS
Storing data about users safely and securely
- Be sure to follow any institutional or organizational policies or procedures ove the general advice found here.
- Be careful to understand the purpose of the data you are collecting and ensure that you’re not collecting data you don’t need and what data you do collect you consider the risks of it being made public.
- Users can offer some surprising, honest feedback sometimes that they don’t fully realise could harm them so be sure to ask them if they’d like any information struck from the notes/data or if they want to be careful with certain topics.
Maintaining a database of user participants for user experience research
- Follow any policies and procedures that are set by any institutions or organizations you are affiliated with.
- Consider what data you will keep secure and what could be made public without any consequences.
- Consider how and where you might store the data and what levels of permissions, abstraction and password protection you need.
- Explore and note down how and when you would re-contact a user participant in the future for any further user experience research.
Ethical user experience research
- Follow any institution or organization ethics and/or morals procedures ahead of additional ones of your own.
- Consider where ethics and morals might arise in your open source science projects. Think about how you might respond to or mitigate any of these occurrences and ensure you are taking care of yourself and user participants’ health and wellbeing.
Keeping understandable and accessible notes
- Best practices for accessible and understandable notes can be summarised as ensuring you are using different text styles for different kinds of structure and data in your writing.
- Ensure that your files can be accessed without payment/login/internet connection.
- Maintaining a glossary will help you and anyone else who explores your user experience research in the future.
Open source user experience research
- Making your user experience research open and open source can offer benefits such as allowing your users and contributors to follow essential development in your open source science software without needing to directly ask you which can boost trust and contributions.
- Be sure to check over your open source licenses and make sure you’re happy that an existing license covers what you need it to do for your user experience research or consider another license or an amendment to a license for you to be happy.
Preparing your rapid usability test
Preparing your interview study
Preparing your rapid usability test
Recruiting participants
Recruitment strategy and refining your user audience
- Defining your parameters, timings and criteria for who you intend to do user experience research with as well as the behaviours and characteristic preferences of the users.
Finding users
- Consider building your network and contacts casually through channels you don’t typically engage with and asking people you know who might have broader connections to gain access to users and communities you don’t typically inhabit.
- Be aware and respond appropriately to the complex and changing nature of global access to the internet. Many people do not have free and unrestricted access to the internet in order to participate in user experience research.
Crafting Recruitment messaging
- Consider if you’ll be sending messages to a wider audience and/or one to one messages to people you have contact details for.
- Recruitment messages work best when they are readable within a minute or so, avoid anything that is longer than half a page of text at a legible text size.
- Allow potential user experience research participants to ask follow up questions and consider building a frequently asked questions document for them to look at or you to reference.
Screener surveys and scheduling
- Screeners are used to refine the pool of potential user participants by criteria you set and also to gain some insight on their behaviours ahead of your user experience research.
- Be sure to keep screeners short and clear, letting user participants fill out information as honestly and clearly as possible.
Thinking longer term and building a user participant list
- Planning for the longer term might be out of reach for most, but if you have time and capacity, thinking about ways to open up, pass on or document what you’ve already done can help your scientific open source software continue to be well supported by user experience research insights into the future.
- Consider what (if any) compensation or thanks you can offer those that participate in your user experience research.
Conducting Interviews
Building trust with users and leading into your user experience research questions
- Review your goals, objectives and hopes for your user experience research
- Understand the purpose of a warm up question or statement and how to help users feel comfortable speaking with you about their thoughts, experiences and opinions.
Encouraging users and the ‘5 whys’ method
- Understand how to ask varied ‘why’ questions to get to the root causes of a problem.
- Clarifying by repeating what you think those root causes are back to the user can help you be confident about your understanding of the users root causes.
Improvising questions, guiding discussion and remembering you goal/research question
- Being able to re-frame or improvise based on new information/context a user can offer in an interview needs to be assessed ‘in the moment’ and is a skill you build proficiency at as your practice.
- Build and form strategies for when users are not forthcoming with information, resistant or reflect questions back at you. Remember, any user experience researcher can get caught out if that’s the user’s intention in the interaction.
Time management strategies for user interviews
- Setting timers or allocating certain time for questions can help you keep track of what timings you are working with.
- Ensure that the timings don’t interfere with the user’s natural behaviour and responses.
Recording, taking notes and data collection
- What’s most critical is that you capture data of some sort, be it video, audio, written or a combination of these.
- You can choose to add tags or themes to notes as you capture the data but it’s not a strongly advised requirement at the data collection stage.
- One of the ultimate purposes of interviews is about gathering enough information from outside your own experience in order to make well-informed decisions.
Conducting a rapid usability assessment
The think aloud protocol
- Going through the tasks yourself or with another person that meets the criteria of your users can help you understand how feasible your tasks and questions are in relation to timings.
- Ensure your ‘think aloud’ probing questions are related to your goals for user experience research and/or your overall research question. Be sure to balance how often you are probing.
Helping users recover from an error
- Users often take different pathways to complete a task than you anticipated. They also often encounter errors even if you’ve tested extensively for error states. Planning for how long you’re happy to have users divert from the pathway you want to test is up to your own judgment.
Simultaneous observation and note-taking
- Using technology and people-based support can help you gather more data that can be checked against transcripts and time stamps but if in doubt about what you have access to, go slow, be accurate and stay realistic about the balance of observation and data note-taking.
Interpreting results
Start making sense of your user experience research data
- Synthesis/interpreting is a stage of user experience research in which you read, analyse, compare, organize and reorganize information to make sense of it.
- Start this stage as early as possible to avoid memory degradation of the data you’ve collected.
- Ensure your notes and transcriptions are accurate and understandable as soon as you can.
- Decide if you’d like to include more people in the process of interpreting and synthesising data.
- Set up your interpreting/synthesis space by collecting data in one place, preferably on individual sticky notes and/or cells of a spreadsheet.
Label and define findings and insights
- Ensuring your user experience ‘data’ is collected into short individual statements will help with labelling processes.
- Following a labelling methodology can either be the common repeating words and themes in a users’ data, your interpretations and observations along these themes and involve the definition and expressions from the users of the tasks completed.
Sort and cluster findings and insights
- Clustering and sorting processes like Affinity Diagramming help you to further distill learnings from your user experience research data in the form of ‘themes’
- Be careful that any process of understanding, sorting and clustering doesn’t mean you’re inferring incorrect meaning on user experience research data.
- Ensure you offer clarity and explanation around the themes you extract and how it relates back to your goal or does not relate back to your goal and therefore are not as critical for your work. This also helps when making clear and transparent OSS documentation about your user experience research.
Interpreting and asserting your understanding on user experience research data
- Interpreting results can follow a number of methods, ones that work best for you and your project needs, goals and roadmap. Making sure those interpretations refer back to users, their needs and the labels and themes you’ve identified helps others, when looking at your interpretations, see the deduction journey you took from source (user) to interpretation.
Ending the interpretation and understanding stage of user experience research
- You set the ‘definition of done’ for when the interpretation process is complete.
- Consider making your process open and accessible in whatever state of compilation that they are. This means potential open source contributors can get involved.
Connecting the dots and next steps
Working in the open
- Making a minimum effort to be open and transparent with your user experience research, as long as your institution’s policies and procedures allow, will help your open source science software project be sustainable for the long term.
- Governance and decision making in your open science software project doesn’t need to be long and highly detailed. It can serve a limited purpose of transparency for a period of time.
Prioritization processes
- Prioritizing processes and methods are about clarity, evidence, communication and often about getting all stakeholders and involved parties in agreement on what should be focused on at what time.
- As long as an assertion can be made for a prioritisation that is grounded in the user data and subsequent statements, then prioritization follows.
- Prioritization is most beneficial and useful to people external to your open science software project so they can understand what to expect and roughly when to expect it. This can also help them to know when and how to offer assistance and contributions as well as signalling to funders and institutions that you’re thinking about users beyond yourself and how your open source science software fits into the wider user-base.
Finding resources to help guide changes in your open source scientific software
- There are resources and references online that can help any kind of specific open source science project improve.
- UI kits and design systems are existing and established ways that people have implemented UI for users. They often specialise in a certain type of software, tool or user-type.