How to kickstart your user research for a UX design project
I’ve spent the past few months diving deeper into UX and Product Design. Why? Because I’ve realized that the entirety of my past 4 years has been, in some way or form, spent using design methods or principles to better products, online experiences and people’s businesses. My work has led me to the use of design principles and methods even when I was unaware of what product or UX design was.
Now, I don’t believe I’ve amassed the experience yet or the proof/portfolio to hold myself up to others who’ve designed for companies like Apple, Google, Twitter, etc. However, as growing designers, we continue to pursue problems and find real-world solutions to them through our work.
One of those problems for me and for the market I’m from is Healthcare. Healthcare, like Education and Crime, is a wicked problem that has no clear answer. Yet, for the Caribbean, the number of people a simple change in the system can help could be astounding.
But why should I be the one to tackle this problem? Why should a novice UX designer take on a grand challenge like this?
Simple answer… because I have no idea about how healthcare works. I’m not an expert and can’t claim to be.
Now, before I dive deeper, I want to make it clear. I’ve read a large number of UX case studies plastered all over Medium, in Facebook groups and many other UX/UI platforms that show fancy UI graphics, animations and app design. If you’re looking for fancy stuff, this isn’t the place. This isn’t a UX Case Study of a designed app, website or product. This is an actual platform aimed at solving a real problem.
Where does Empathy start?
With any design course, school or program, the first thing you’re taught is to empathize. But what’s does it really mean to empathize? My thought is that you don’t simply aim to understand what the other person is going through. You want to be able to be in the shoes. Feel as they would feel — or come as close to it as possible. That’s why empathy takes time, openness and vulnerability. It takes a genuine want to find out what hurts, how it hurts and why it hurts.
In this particular case, my partner and I had to find out from those in need of help what the true challenges were. What really stood out to them negatively? What were they truly frustrated with? Luckily, my business partner had some first-hand experience and helped guide my observations and questioning.
My partner, being a student of Global Healthcare Implementation, spent some of her past 2 years answering questions and fielding queries from a number of friends, family and acquaintances about medical problems, finding specialists in Trinidad and Tobago, and concerns about the lack of qualified options.
Not only were we able to hear feedback from relevant people, but we were also able to observe what went on in highly critical moments.
Take, for example, a family searching for an orthodontist. This one family attended their dental appointment, only to be told that the dentist is unable to solve their son’s problem. The mother was also referred to see an orthodontist. The challenge was that this orthodontist was unreachable via any on-hand information. As a concerned mother, she went to the only other option available at that time — Google. During her frantic search, she was unable to locate any other orthodontist’s office — a full 20 minutes online search in vain. As she complained to relatives on the phone, she was unable to get any proper referrals.
What are some problems that stand out there? Our observations, coupled with questions, feedback and research, led us to believe that there were multiple problems at play in this particular scenario.
- Qualified healthcare specialists were not easily found online.
- Google did not work for smaller, localized search options in healthcare.
- Google, like Facebook, relied on healthcare practitioners proactively inputting their own information online via a website or business page.
- Healthcare professionals rely on referrals for their business.
- Millennials find it hard to get proper local healthcare information because their online options are limited.
- Local healthcare centres are unable to update their information or provide great online options for searchers and the public in need of help.
I’ve outlined a few problems here, which may have multiple solutions for each. But the bigger question we had to ask before getting deeper was how people and practitioners viewed and used online search on a daily basis?
Our dental observation above highlighted a key element and scenario of how someone would search in an emergency. However, it was unable to guide us to the knowledge of how people use healthcare services daily or weekly. Was this singular experience a representation of everyone? Or was this an isolated incident? Was this a daily occurrence or an anomaly?
Fashioning Surveys and Interviews to Uncover Valuable Information.
There are many ways to gather insight and empathize with users. For us, during this COVID-19 crisis, we had to find ways to get accurate feedback from others in a way that they were comfortable sharing. After all, healthcare is also a personal subject for many and talking about health.
The big challenge was that we were also dealing with a society going through a shock-therapy shift from culturally-rooted in-person meet and greets to an online collaboration spiral where everyone was learning a new platform — often for the very first time. So how could be help people share the best information possible without making them feel defensive and agitated?
Start with something familiar.
User research is an important aspect of any product or UX design process. And while getting user research right is the main goal, the question I’ve come to is what is considered the right in user research?
Now, there isn’t one holy grail method to conduct user research. But there are methods that can help fish the right answers. If you’re at all familiar with research, you’ll already know that there is a quantitative and a qualitative method to gather information.
Quantitative methods include surveys with multiple-choice questions, analytics detailing usage, eye-tracking and A/B testing.
Qualitative methods include open-ended interviews, field studies and concept or usability testing.
Both methods rely on certain strengths to gather the best form of information from your users or potential customers but also have specific weaknesses.
For us, we decided to use both methods to gather information. We carefully started with a quantitative approach, asking very pointed questions that enabled us to understand the public and how they currently view healthcare in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean.
Why did we decide to start with a large canvas? Because healthcare was a very broad canvas and wanted to know the various problems that the public encountered daily. We also wanted a way to make sure we can get a large number of participants and find trends within the quantitative research that could help us identify those who suffered similar problems.
Our survey carried 10 questions, with relevant input fields for contact details and authorization to follow up.
While the pool of surveyed people numbered the hundreds, we had specific criteria to select specific interviewees for the next step of this project.
One strategy we used was based on Google Venture’s approach — where we also wrote a recruiting screener. This document enabled us to formulate specific survey questions that upheld our criteria which we used to identify 10 candidates to interview.
Here’s an image of Google Venture’s Recruiting Screener is placed below.
One we were able to identify who we wanted to speak to out of the survey participants, we made sure to develop our interview questionnaire in a way that allowed us the flexibility to explore important “why” and “how” questions.
As this also dealt with an ongoing and real-life project, we drafted non-disclosure agreements and consent forms for each participant to sign or voice agreement during the interview (voicing agreement was done as some of our interviewees were less tech-savvy and were unable to print, sign, upload or digitally sign the document.)
To find out how our participants viewed and used the current healthcare system, we designed questions that allowed us to dive deeper into the initial observations and responses from the survey and from the experiential situations my partner and I encountered.
We started with simple questions about our participants, their lifestyle and information they could readily answer without any cognitive trouble. We then went deeper into the healthcare field to find out how they used the healthcare system as regular users and what problems they encountered along the way.
Examples of these questions included:
- What does a typical day in the week look like for you? What does a typical day on the weekend look like for you?
- What time do you normally do when you wake up?
- What do you do during your day at work?
- What thoughts normally go through your head on a day to day basis?
- How was your most recent experience with using healthcare in Trinidad and Tobago?
- What is your biggest challenge when it comes to getting healthcare?
- How do you view medical insurance when it comes to your healthcare and your doctor visits?
- What was the first thing you did when you realized you had a medical issue or situation?
- What are some things you did when you were sick before contacting your doctor? Why did you decide to do this?
- What did you do to book your appointment, if you did?
These questions enabled us to get to the bottom of the current healthcare system from a local user’s standpoint. It also allowed us to move from “what” to “how” and “why” questioning. This opened up more avenues to understand and develop empathy for what our users go through when they are in need to care.
As a side-note, I have never been a great fan of the public healthcare system. However, it was important to leave out my own biases and preferences when conversing or interviewing. Keeping this in mind is easier said than done. But with practice, you’ll be able to have a true beginner’s mindset to point out the most relevant “hows” and “whys.”
How we analyzed the information.
With loads of information, video interviews and questionnaires to sift through, we needed a better way to consolidate all the input and organize it in a way that was easy to understand, compare and analyze.
If you’ve never heard of an Affinity Diagram, I suggest you get to know how to use them well. Why? Because they are life-savers, especially when you have hours of information to sift through.
Step 1 in Affinity Diagramming.
We started to compile our Affinity Diagram by reviewing each interview in detail, taking relevant notes on post-its for reference. This is what our board looked like when we started:
In this affinity diagram, we focused on various types of information:
- Demographics
- Comments
- Problems
- Interviewee preferences
- How they did things
- Why they did things
- Lifestyle
… and anything else we could note.
Step 2 in Affinity Diagramming.
The second step in this process was to sort this information into something we can use and share between ourselves easily while being able to understand how the answers related to each other.
2 ways we did this was to categorize our affinity diagram into easy to understand groups and create an Empathy Map to help us keep in touch with our potential users or customers as we continue through the design process.
The Next Steps?
While these two images seem like simple images with markups, the information categorized on each has allowed us to get a better picture of what our users go through every day with the current healthcare system. They allowed us to see the actions they take when confronted with health problems through their eyes. We were also able to see whether their problems were minor or major and how they accessed different professional providers in the system.
This process took us a month to organize and execute. And while that may seem like a long time, this valuable time helped us make smarter and better decisions moving forward, including in our next step — where we took this information and used it to define our problem.
Defining the problem was the next step in the d.school’s Design Thinking methodology and is important for any project or product you’re developing. I’ll share what we did for the next steps in the next chapter.
