How to prepare for a (last-minute) field user research
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Contextual user research helps us understand how other people do certain things and achieve the goals that are important to them. It gives us context and perspective, enables us to overcome our own biases and sheds light on invaluable insights when making product design decisions.
Unfortunately there is not always time nor resources to conduct extensive research early on — especially if you are the sole UX Designer in the company. In this case, juggling projects and conflicting deadlines make it hard to be involved in a project’s early stage discovery work. Given those circumstances, I’d agree with the notion that “some user research is better than none”, so when a last minute opportunity for exploratory research arose I took it without a second thought.
Interviewing users can take a lot of planning and effort. But what do you do when opportunity knocks at very short notice?
This post is about sharing key learnings from a relevant experience where I had only one day to prepare for a field research study. I’ve also included a few tips that helped my team and I make the most out of it, that will hopefully prove useful to you too.
Agree on a main research objective.
Having a main research objective shared among the team keeps everyone focused on what needs to be explored and then iterate to improve understanding further.
Start with setting the questions you are trying to answer. What do you need to know at this stage? What are the knowledge gaps you need to fill in? Try to answer those questions collaboratively with your team.
In our case, our main research objective was to gain contextual insights into people’s natural behaviour and discover opportunities for addressing their needs. We aimed at getting familiar with common terms and lingo used, understanding staff’s operational problems more deeply and identifying how current problems map on to our product offering.
Write down a set of assumptions.
“One must assume something to discover something”. Identifying your team’s assumptions upfront will help mitigate biases in user research and form useful hypotheses later on when designing solutions for the problem(s) at hand. Among other things, research should be used to challenge assumptions so that you are in position to discover the truth.
It is important that assumptions are made explicit. To this end, we listed out our initial assumptions so that we have something to compare against our qualitative findings. If the findings challenge your assumptions then you might need to reconsider your product offering or investigate further.
Prepare a research plan.
Having a research plan provides a framework to work from. It helps the team remain aligned to the agreed research objectives and on track in relation to the key things that are to be covered/achieved.
In our case, we were armed with an agenda for the day, including the key people to meet and a simple interview guide with the questions we wanted to ask.
Put together an interview guide.
Creating an effective interview guide is key to an interview being successful. The guide is a schematic representation of questions or topics to be explored. It gives the researcher and team the opportunity to prepare questions ahead of time and keep the conversations focused around research objectives.
There are plenty of great articles and posts online to help you write good questions and get you started with the interview guide; this article is about asking the right questions, this one is about avoiding leading questions, and this one is about getting the most out of user research.
For our field study, I prepared a fairly short interview guide based on conversations I had with key team members. We were happy to see that it proved helpful to everyone even when only used loosely.
Share research tips with your team in advance.
Interviewing users is an art. The type of questions but also the way questions are being asked can make or break the outcomes of a study. A good piece of advice I was given by a senior researcher, with whom I had the honour to work earlier on in my career, was to include 2 to 3 main interview tips on the interview guide and share with the team. The purpose of those tips is to educate the inexperienced about the basic principles and practices of conducting (user) interviews.
I kept the tips easy and straightforward:
- Write down what the participant says or does — don’t paraphrase or assume what they mean. If you have a thought on how to interpret something, make a separate note.
- Try not to ask leading questions. Questions that can be answered with a Yes or No are leading! Questions that start with “Would you…” or “Why do you…” invite the participant to guess. Instead ask open questions about actual behaviour, for example “When did you last …” or “What do you think about that?”
- Listen and let the participant talk.
Take notes.
Taking notes of research observations is key to helping you get great research results. To get the most out of a research session make a detailed record of what happened. You can read more about note taking here.
Note taking in research can take many forms, from hand written notes, post-it notes, electronic note taking to taking photos, audio and video recordings. Whatever your chosen method, make sure you plan the details in advance to make the most out of your notes. The last thing you want is to be juggling between an ink-less pen, a tablet that hasn’t been updated or an uncharged mobile!
What I’ve found very useful when keeping notes on my phone is creating one note per participant, which I pre-populate with the questions and title them with the participant’s name. It keeps me up to speed when things happen simultaneously and gives the flexibility to switch between notes at any time and fast.
Learnings
The field interview is by far one of the most valuable methods of user research. You get the opportunity to observe people in their context of use and see behaviour patterns, mindsets and goals, which you can only get from the context of one to one interviews.
With field research unexpected things come up and you realise you didn’t know what to ask. You need to go in with the research question “How does X do their work and how do they use information to do their work?” because you don’t know what to discover.
- Kim Goodwin
Key learnings:
- Keep an open mind. Be prepared to abandon your preconceptions, assumptions and beliefs. When interviewing people try to leave any predispositions or biases behind. Note down objective observations and the things that are said and done by the participants.
- Talk to different types of users so you get a holistic understanding of the problem. Take advantage of your team’s involvement and work together to cover everything. In our case we had six user types to talk to and we worked collaboratively to ensure all viewpoints were captured.
- Don’t rely on your colleagues’ notes. As the team’s designer and researcher, take responsibility and ensure that observations are recorded and shared amongst the team. A good practice is to share observations as soon as possible (ideally the same day) and capitalise on the benefits of recency. In our case, once we headed back to the office, I created a spreadsheet and populated it with my observations. I shared this with the team and invited them to contribute too.
- Revisit your assumptions. Were your assumptions validated or did you discover something new? If so, how can your product offering cater for those needs? These are interesting conversations sparked by the insights you gain from observing and talking to potential users of your product. During the “Synthesis” stage you make sense of the data you gathered and discover opportunities and implications on your product.
- It’s ok if you don’t follow the interview guide by the letter. In our case, the field day was more of a guerrilla field research. We had some loose guidelines and a number of best practices to apply throughout the day.
- If you decide to go for electronic note taking make sure you have a plan B in case you run out of battery!
- Remember to stay hydrated. It’s a full-on day, you’ll need water (and food) to keep you sharp and energised.
Further reading:
- https://theuxreview.co.uk/user-research-the-beginners-guide/
- https://www.nngroup.com/articles/field-studies/
- https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/09/5-step-process-conducting-user-research/
- https://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2015/10/identifying-and-validating-assumptions-and-mitigating-biases-in-user-research.php
Thanks for reading!