Marco helped the Home team understand the expectations people might have for the product and identify potential interaction issues. He collected and analyzed feedback through interviews, diary studies, surveys and discussion groups. […] Anything that changes the deep relationship people have with their device is really challenging to design for. You can’t predict what people will expect and how they’ll react.” […] “We acted quickly and used quite a few different research methods and approaches to mitigate not only the fact that the phone is so personal, but also that we wanted to cover different contexts and situations of use. Doing this also allowed us to gather data and feedback at different paces, and to have a solid sense of patterns of behavior from an early stage.”
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People aren’t very good at predicting what they want. Especially if you ask them out of context, like with a survey.
At Polyvore we use a method we call “Fake Doors” : You put a fake door in front of someone and then you see if they try to open it. In a web product what this means is you pretend it exists and then you see if anybody clicks on it.
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Don’t listen to users
Observe behavior…
I don’t listen to users because of the psychology of attitude & behavior
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Many studies found no relationship between attitude and behavior
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Don’t ask what people need
Instead observe what they doDon’t ask for feedback
Instead watch them use it— GA class: High-Quality, Impactful, Fast UX Research for Engineers
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Fake doors
You can quickly see whether customers will engage with a new feature by launching just the first part of it. We did this with CustomMade, a startup that lets people order custom-built products. Our idea was to let visitors save others’ projects for inspiration. But instead of laboriously building the whole feature, we just launched the first button. When we observed a huge number of visitors clicking the button to access that function, we knew we were onto something and built the rest of the feature.
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A glimpse at one of Google’s usability labs (begins 2:50)
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In this case study we describe a four-step process for eliciting and analyzing user behavior with products over an extended period of time. We used this methodology for conducting a comparative study of two mobile applications over a period of seven months with 17 participants.
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The participants’ ultimate impressions of the applications differed markedly from their first impressions, lending further evidence that longitudinal study … is essential in evaluating product usability and usefulness.
— Case Study: Longitudinal Comparative Analysis for Analyzing User Behavior (pdf)
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Mr. Zuckerberg takes a decidedly deliberate approach to product development.
That’s evident in how the 28-year-old CEO led the creation of Timeline […] The new feature was a culmination of an 18-month process that included dozens of test versions and multiple focus groups.
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The group created at least 100 versions of the product, according to employees on the team.
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As valuable as user prototypes and user testing may be, often you need live data in order to determine if an idea actually works.
Some of my favorite examples of this are when applying game dynamics to e-commerce, search result relevance, many social features, and of course funnel work.
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Generative research is a collection of knowledge about people who might potentially use your services or products … generative research focuses on internal reasoning while a person does something of particular interest to your organization. This knowledge helps your team produce better ideas, more on track with people’s real life situations. The knowledge gives you empathy.
Generative research works hand-in-hand with evaluative research as a part of a cycle that keeps risk, concealed opportunities, and wasted investment at bay.
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As product manager, you know your job is to gain a deep understanding of your target customer, the problems to be solved, and whether you can come up with a product that meets these needs. You know you need to work closely and directly with customers in order to come up with a product that will meet the needs of hundreds of customers (and thousands or even millions of users), but you also know there aren’t enough hours in the day to work directly with this many customers.
My favorite technique for addressing both of these problems – getting deep insight into my target customers and having great reference customers at launch – is to use a charter customer program (also known as a “Customer Advisory Board” or “Customer Council” or by similar names).
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Ana Chang, a researcher for Facebook’s Photos feature, has been conducting a series of in-home interviews over the last few months. The goal? To discover why people feel the way they do about their photographs.
The general idea is that we focus on getting to know a few people very, very well. We sit down and really talk to a person about what motivates them. We start with the basic, concrete things but then we move on to their needs and desires and aspirations, and how these things fit into the context of everything else in their lives. We’re trying to get an idea of the individual cultural and social factors driving the decisions that lead to specific behaviors.
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Human Memory Is Complicated
People reconstruct memories, which means they are always changing. You can trust what users say as the truth only a little bit. It is better to observe them in action than to take their word for it.
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Experience sampling method
This research methodology, developed by Larson and Csikszentmihalyi (1983) asks participants to stop at certain times and make notes of their experience in real time. The point is for them to record temporal things like feelings while in the moment (right then, not later; right there, not elsewhere). They can be given a journal with many identical pages. Each page can have a psychometric scale, open-ended questions, or anything else used to assess their condition in that place and time.
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in the world of social activities, “user tasks” fall apart as a meaningful measure of activity. Highly experienced with traditional usability research, Dana found herself recognizing how deeply lacking lab-based methods like think-aloud studies are when it comes to understanding people’s behaviors on the social web. Individuals are not operating all alone; they are not necessarily goal-driven; they don’t have “tasks” that are neatly accomplished in a lab. Rather, the social web is about context and relationships. She advocated for using more field-based testing methods; doing more testing with multiple users in one session; and employing longitudinal tools like video diaries with retrospective reviews and/or experience sampling via text messaging. Overall, she concluded, user research for the social web will take more time to conduct and require more creativity to discover what’s right.
— My Interaction12 Recap : as long as it’s gotta be // February 14 2012
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So, to start: what is UX?
Specifically, what do we mean by the X of “eXperience”?
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In fact, only an extremely small portion of what we experience in our daily lives gets encoded into our memory.
Our psychological present — the world as we now experience it — is extremely short; only a few seconds.
If, within that time span, something does not get encoded into our long-term memory, it is lost forever…
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After much research an many experiments, Kahneman’s conclusion was that WE ALL HAVE 2 SELVES:
• An EXPERIENCING self,
• And a REMEMBERING self.
And they are very different. […] According to Prof. Kahneman, our 2 selves are different and “are made happy by different things.”
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Whenever doing surveys or asking for feedback, it is important to keep in mind it is not possible to inquire how someone experienced something.
The answers will always come from the remembering self, never the experiencing self (by definition).
And the answers will always be skewed because of the inevitable focusing illusion.
Simply by the act of stopping to think about something, you exaggerate its real-life importance.
