Strategies for User Research

Purpose of User Research

• Designers should select research strategies based on the desired user experiences in the context of the product, service or system.
• The purpose of user research is to identify needs that reveal the complexities of personae.
• Real-life scenarios that simulate “actual” user experiences can generate new findings.

• User research allows for designers to create a persona, which can help influence the design process by testing their actions and reactions in various scenarios.

Strategies

• Designers should select research strategies based on the desired user experiences in the context of the product, service or system.
• The purpose of user research is to identify the needs that reveal the complexities of personae.
• Real-life scenarios that stimulate "actual" user experiences can generate new findings.

• The various strategies for user research can be used by the designer to explore the true nature of a problem.
• Through the use of personae and use cases, the designer can build a range of possible scenarios with which to explore all the problem in detail.

User Population

• The user population is the range of users for a particular product or system.
• Users in a population can then be classified under various criteria.

Classification of Users

• Users can be classified by various factors, such as age, gender and physical condition (namely disabilities).

• This can allow the designer to gather detailed feedback to generate insights for design development that are particular to each group.
• The different needs of user groups mean that their feedback will all vary, mostly depending on what they prioritize. This allows designs to be specialized to serve the group in the best way possible.

Use of Personae

• Designers can observe and interview members of a user population in order to create fictional characters known as personae, secondary personae, and anti-personae.

• Personae are far more detailed than the profiles generated through stereotypes. They tend to be more accurate and are more particular to a specific type of user.
• Personae also represent a fictional person, whose actions can be predicted and modeled, whereas a stereotype can only represent assumptions about a population.

Personae

• A persona is a fictional person who represents a major user group and is behavior-based.
• Personae are used to make decisions about a product's features, use and design.
• Persona are presented to the design team as a single human with a name, face, attitudes and goals.
• A persona represents the someone in the target user group.

• Personae put a human face on the anonymous ‘user’, because they are based on actual human user needs.
• They save time by focusing development toward real cases and away from unlikely, ‘edgy’ and loosely defined cases.

What Personae Should Be

• Be based on user research including contextual and individual interviews and systems observations.
• Be based primarily on qualitative research of users.
• Be focused on users’ goals.
• Be based on common behavior patterns.
• Be specific to your design context or problem.
• Come to life, and seem like real people.

What Personae Should Not Be

• Be focused on stereotypes and generalizations.
• Be an "average" of observed behavior patterns.
• Be based on user roles.
• Be based on information gathered from subject matter experts, as they cannot represent end users.

Reasons Why a Persona is Created

• Understanding the user profoundly and in detail as if you knew them fully.
• Identifying which group of customers need to be valued.
• Discovering the needs of the actual user may not have recognized themselves.
• Improving the quality of products and services across a wide spectrum of design.

Secondary Personae

• Secondary personae are personae of those who are not the primary target audience for a product, but whose needs the product should meet.
• They are able to provide valuable alternative insights to the development of a product.

Anti-Personae

• An anti-personae is a personae of those for whom the product is not designed for.
• Anti-personae can be used to design the product in a way that prevents misuse or to make it unappealing to those that the product isn't intended for.

Scenarios

• A scenario is an imagined sequence of events in the daily life of a persona, based on assumptions by researchers and designers.
• Personae that are created are often put into scenarios to predict how they would react, based on that persona.

• Designers consider the best case, worst case and average case scenarios, which provide a physical and social context for different personae.
• Sometimes unlikely scenarios can be worth considering as well, as they might provide an insight that had not been thought of.

Use Case

• A use case is a set of possible sequences of interactions or event steps between a user and a product to achieve a particular actions.
• It depicts all possible interactions and can be shown in a step form or in a diagram.
• The use case diagram helps to analyze all possible use cases of a product, which allows designers to avoid the unintended use cases.