Acing User Research Interviews with a simple 4 phase process
User research for a software product was a novel idea for me while starting my journey as a Business Analyst (BA) in Thoughtworks. My experience designer(XD) was fairly accustomed to user research . Thus, helped me get onboarded to the idea and expectations from the same.
Now that I have been through numerous user researches, I can visualise the whole experience for a user research as a 4 phase process which I have elaborated below.
Initiation Phase
Initiation phase starts when someone brings in the idea of a user research for a topic / feature — it can be any role in the team — BA, XD, PO, QA, Dev and not limited to XD or BA advocating the same. Idea is proposed to the team and outlined on how the user research could potentially benefit the topic / feature in hand.
However, one role which is really critical for this idea to move forward is the Product owner(PO). They need to be supportive of this idea as they are the folks who would generally have access to end users and would arrange time for user research with them.
Different organisations may have different roles or people who would be connected to end users and take care of facilitating user research appointments. For simplicity , I would be referring to PO as that role.
Preparing for user research
Once it has been agreed during the Initiation Phase that user research would be conducted, the next phase is the preparation phase. This is particularly important and below points specify things that shall be taken care of.
- Type of interview : User researches can be conducted in different ways -contextual, usability tests etc. It must be clear what type of interview is going to be conducted so that preparation can take place accordingly.
- Script Preparation : This is probably the most critical element in the preparation phase. Script basically outlines the steps on how the flow of a user research interview would work.
Group ( which would at most times at least include XD, BA, PO) who would join the user research session, come together to brainstorm and discuss what sort of questions they would like to ask users or actions they would like to see them executing. A sample script could like the one below
Consider Renata is PO, Simon is XD and Paul is user in below example where user research is focused on create Order functionality in their product.
- Designs Readiness : In case we are doing a usability test, designers would invariably be preparing simple or click-through mockups to facilitate discussion with the users. Another important aspect while making designs ready is to make sure that data reflected in the design should correspond to real life scenarios as possible. Completely mock data tends to make users skeptical and put them off.
Designs must be ready before the session can be conducted.
- User Access: For any contextual inquiry session, it must be made sure users have the right access to system and tools so that script can be executed as per plan else expected results would not be generated.
- User Identification : It must be clear what is the role of the user in the system whom the user research is targeting so that research appointments are scheduled within the triggered group only.
For example : Expectations of a sales person may be vastly different from a sales Manager.
- Number and Time Requirement for user research interviews : Most of our user research was done with 3–5 users with session time ranging anywhere from 15–60 mins. So make sure to tell your PO how many users and time is needed for the user research appointment. In my case, it is the XD who confirms these requirements.
- Scheduling the interviews : Scheduling the interviews can run parallel to script and design preparation. PO would take care of finding the right users for the research and scheduling the interviews with them.
PO would invariably talk to users beforehand and set brief context regarding the research so that any preparation on part of users can be done before the research appointment too.
- For example, in our case, some data preparation would take a couple of days. So users were requested to have such data identified or prepare them beforehand.
Executing the Plan
Session would generally start with greetings and introductions with the user to make them comfortable. Afterwards, the primary agenda of the session is taken up.
In our case, it is our XD who leads the session while first setting context with the user what we are going to do. In the case of native speakers, PO helps out translating user’s responses to English. Some of key points/learnings during this phase are listed below
- Keep an eye on how users go about taking actions in the system — where do they click first, what they find annoying/ difficult to understand( during usability test), what information is more important to them.
Basically focus not on just what the user say but how they actually work through the system.
- While one person (XD in our case), leads through the discussions and executes the script but others also chip in with their questions.
Attempt is for maximising from the user’s experience and clearly understand their expectations / wishes / pain points.
- Invariably at least one person would play the role of note taker to capture observations made during the session along with XD.
- One of significant learnings from these sessions is that script is just a starting point but feel free to wander around if it adds to the narrative and brings in additional insights.
- Session ends with thanking the user and acknowledging for spending their time with us to share their insights.
Most of the time, users expressed their wish to take part in further research appointments in our case.
Findings Summarisation
Once all the user research sessions are completed, notes are consolidated to present findings to the complete group. Invariably, it helps in making decisions and learn about
- Easy identification for MVP scope for features and making sure that users would get all required functionality when the feature is rolled out.
- Adjust our designs/ mockups / system process flow per user feedback and incorporate / remove functions from feature(s)
- Additional features that could make user’s life easier when they are interacting with the System.
Summary
I had not experienced or took part in any user research till I joined Thoughtworks. So when this idea was presented to me, I was excited and a bit apprehensive on how this would play out. Eventually doing the whole exercise in a methodological way as I stated above helped out get the results we wanted to get out of user research.
I feel that this blog could help anyone who is about to start their journey into user research or could act as a refresher for ones who are already doing it.
If you are interested in further reading about Design Thinking, you can refer my blog here.
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