What do we ask?

The first step of finding a solution is making sure you have the right problem. This is where you have to sieve through a lot of information and noise with the hope that the there’s a signal at the end of line. There are several ways to do this, including user research, interviews and workshops. Throughout these sessions, you will have excellent opportunities to dissect a business and ask questions as an outsider looking in.

With so much to ask, how do we know which are the right questions? As a rule, we avoid asking leading questions such as:

• “tell us what you need”
• “will exporting to Excel spreadsheet work for you?”
• “would you like to have a white or black dashboard?”
• “what do you think about this feature?”

Doing so will result in only cosmetic solution that doesn’t solve the real problem. It will not lead to a transformative result that will create the impact your client is looking for. It is hollow and you, the designer, know it.

Instead, we try and ask questions like

• “what are problems you face when performing this task?”
• “which information helps you make more informed decision?”
• “what is the goal of your task?”
• “how does achieving that goal contribute to your KPI?”
• “who do you rely on to accomplish that goal?”

This helps re-frame the discussion from being feature-oriented to being user-oriented. After all, we’re not designing for system. We’re designing for people.

Who do we ask?

At Stampede, we start asking preliminary questions very early on in the client engagement to get an idea of the complexity at hand. We then develop loose hypothesis to help guide the early stage discussions.

The peak question-vaganza though happens during our UX workshops, a joint focused session that can last between 1-4 days depending on the complexity of the problem. This is where we bunker down with our users and stakeholders to gain clarity on the right problem and validate our hypothesis.

If you don’t have access to the end users, the customer-facing team is the next best thing. They are the front-liners who deal with the end-users the most.

They mitigate frustrations, troubleshoot issues and work with the end users day in and day out. Having them join your discussion will reveal things about your users that sometimes even the CEO is unaware about.

“But these users don’t know what they want!”

We hear this often, especially in organizations where there’s a deep-rooted culture of supremacy over users. The truth is, the more you practice UX, the more you realize you don’t know things. And that every UX session with the users are accelerated learning process for the UX designer, not the other way round.

I think the users know a great deal about the problem they’re facing. They may not know the solution to the problem but then again, it’s our job as UX practitioners to design the solution for them.

Many of us however are not equipped at asking them right questions. Nor are we willing to, if it will upset the way we have always done things.

Guiding principle check

This is where your guiding principles will help you decide. Ask the right question, and you will get closer to the right solution.

Keep asking the wrong ones, because it’s easier and comfortable to do, and you might end up delivering the wrong solution. In doing so, the client would have wasted their money and time—they just don’t know it yet. It’s akin to applying a new coat of paint to a crumbling house—the people outside is impressed by the new façade but the people inside had to cope with the danger of their roof collapsing.

You’d also rob the user of the experience of enjoying a task because they will continue to serve inefficient process and forced to learn using new interface with every “redesign”. And the redesign will keep coming because the problem is never really addressed.

It’s the same circus, just different hoops.

Asking the right questions

At Stampede, we ask questions a lot. You don’t have to prompt us “any question?” because we will keep asking until the session ends or someone stopped us. Our team appreciates curiosity and inquisitiveness big time. We believe that to ask good questions, you first have to ask A LOT of questions. And then you wait for the Law of Averages to kick in after your 100th questions, and then you learn again and that’s how you get better at it.

The good news is, we already have it in us to ask the right question. Asking the right question help us guide our mental exertion towards a worthy focus. We’re not solving superficial problem, we’re solving actual problem affecting real people. For a designer, the power to do this gives us a glowing wholesome feeling. I still get goosebumps when this happens.

Asking the right question takes some experience, but I have learnt that a good listening skill expedite that fairly quickly. When you start a UX consultation session with client, walk into it thinking “I have so much to learn from this” and you will find yourself a better listener. You will start using questions as a tool not to lead the outcome in your favour, but to encourage clarity and design-thinking in everything you touch.

Make it count

As UX practitioners, we have the time, the skills, the team and the resources to make this happen. We can solve users and organizational problems through design-thinking and have it ripple across the board. It will touch so many more people than we originally intended too.

Imagine an engineer enjoying his work more now that he won’t need to wait anymore for an Excel macro to run for an hour before spitting out results needed to start his day. Heck, he will now achieve his daily goals with time to spare. Everything he needs to make a good decision is at his fingertips.

In return, he can pay closer attention to the critical aspect of his job because he knows he now has the right and timely tools to solve his problems.

Perhaps when he drives home, he drives better because his mind is less occupied with problems to solve.

And perhaps he is happier to arrive at work the next morning because he knows his skill and expertise are going to be spent being fully productive, making positive change to his organization.

And because happiness attracts, perhaps he will influence others like him to always be looking to continuously improve things. And they in return will influence others like them. And their organization will pave the way for others in the industry to follow.

Goosebumps?

The post The Users Don’t Know What They Want, or Do They?—Asking the Right Questions for UX appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.

Were answers provided to our questions? Not quite, because we doubt the reviews but we’d love to watch it anyway. So we set up expectations, or metrics – that if something happens or does not happen in the movie, then it’s going to be good. So we go. It ends up making us feel good. Hypotheses proved, metrics met.

In this case, we are the end user. So it is easy to conduct research based on the persona we know best – ourselves. But what if we are taking someone on a date to see the movie, whose favourite genre is entirely different from ours – and impressing him/her is paramount?

The scenario is no different in the user experience (UX) when you are building products, services, applications and websites for people who are intended to use the website, and whose opinions and impressions matter.

In UX, research is important to ensure that we are designing it for the users, instead of ourselves. The formalised research is called UX research, which helps us identify, prove or disprove our assumptions, recognise their needs, mental models, their pain points, challenges as well as what unites them together towards the common goal of using the product. Essentially, research shall add information to our work, improves our understanding and validate our decisions.

How do we start?

Created by Erin Sanders in this article, the Research Learning Spiral provides five main steps for conducting UX research. The first two steps are about forming questions and hypotheses, and the last three steps are about gathering knowledge through selected UX research methods.

1. Objectives. What are the knowledge gaps we need to fill?
2. Hypotheses. What do we think we understand about our users?
3. Methods. Based on time and manpower, what methods should we select?
4. Conduct. Gather data through the selected methods.
5. Synthesise. Fill in the knowledge gaps, prove or disprove our hypotheses, and discover opportunities for our design efforts.

There are many ways to do UX research. The most important question is: how do we frame it within many other factors? These factors can include:

• The end goals of the product – both from business and users’ perspectives
• Time constraint
• Accessibility (to information, users, stakeholders, decision makers etc.)
• Other limitations

The first three are the most common factors we encounter in Stampede. In taking considerations of these factors, we work closely with clients to ensure that we get as much information as possible in the research stage before we begin in the UX designing phase.

The end goals of the product

When a UX research does not take place…

For example, after 3 months of launch, they’d like to see the sales increase 300%.

For strategists, this is an important thing to note – as we can reverse engineer our way in finding out how to increase the sales by 300% through a number of methods, which should be specified in research.

Secondly, the most important thing is of course, to consider the needs of the users. For example, by the end of the process, the client should be receiving testimonials as how easy it is to use the website now. Other ways to measure this expectation is also to install heat map analysis tools for your websites such as Hotjar, Crazy Egg or ClickTale.

The tools on UX shall be explained later in Part 3.

Time constraint

As much as we like to talk to as many users as possible and take much longer to conduct research, most of the time we do not have that luxury.

Typically, user research stage in Stampede takes place for the first two weeks after a UX project kicks off. At this point, as we work closely with our clients on securing the business and user end goals, we also narrow down the best methodologies as possible to fit in the timeframe.

For example, in the course of two weeks, it is quite impossible to conduct a physical workshop involving the main stakeholders who are scattered all over the country. It takes a lot of time by itself for the arrangement and logistics, let alone preparing and conducting it.

So what do we do? In the research stage, we ask the clients…

• … for the contacts of key primary users we can get hold of and ask them for time to do usability tests – depending on accessibility arrangements, if any (see next point)
• … if there are existing products they like, and we do comparison reviews
• … if there are existing data of users we could take a look – users statistics, testimonials, dev site links, wireframes etc. Every data should come of use.

We shall talk about knowing which UX methods to use later in Part 2.

Accessibility

Another factor to take into consideration before starting on the UX research journey is to find out the accessibility of the key stakeholders. These can be:

• The decision maker from the client side – most likely the product owner
• How accessible we are to users if we intend to interview or do usability testing?

Other limitations

When we talk about user experience we often forget about the most important thing: the user’s experience. Too often we are so obsessed with clever solutions and stunning visuals that they completely ignore the fact that their users won’t care about it as long as it works. This is why limitations are key to great UX. The odds of achieving a clear and understandable user experience are way higher if you limit yourself and the features of the product you’re designing depending on the users’ needs.

Other limitations that might surface before you start on UX research would be:

• Scope given by client. There are clients who are lenient about us experimenting and suggesting, but it is always good to check with them every single time.
• Client approval
• Other items that might have been mentioned in Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) e.g. the limits to how accessible the current site data might be, their users or disclosure of current information etc.

All of these can help us to narrow down how to begin our UX research and determine which methodologies to use in the next stage.

What’s next?

Now that we have established the factors that will help us to move to the next stage, here’s one thing to keep in mind: the biggest mistake a UX strategist can make is excluding end users from the process. Start the design process by including the users from the start, listen to their disappointments, pain points as well as what makes them happy – not only while using the product, but also understanding their mental model in general.

In conclusion, UX research is a very interesting process in a sense that it helps us avoid our biases since we are required to figure out solutions for people who are different from us.

What factors have you considered before you embark on a user experience research? Share with us in the comments section!

There are a number of popular methods used in improving the user experience at all phases of research and design. We shall take a look at some popular methods and when you should use them in Part 2: Which Methodologies Should I Use?

The post UX Research Part 1: How Do We Start? appeared first on Stampede: the strategic design & technology company.