Last week our MASC491: User Experience class was fortunate enough to have VCU’s advertising professor Cheng Hong to discuss with us her personal user experience. To her, user experience is the customer’s interaction with any product, whether that’s buying your coffee, using your website, etc. She also talked about how user experience research uses both qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative is looking/feeling at research and quantitative is measuring and analyzing the numbers. She also talked about the types of design that user experience deals with: Visual design, interaction design and information architecture. Visual design is graph design, interaction design it how you put the pieces together, and information architecture is how you present that information.
She also discussed what a day-to-day life as a user experience researcher would be like. In this role, you will create understanding and empathy around user needs, stated and unstated, for your entire product teams including designers, product managers and engineers. Your research will help them create useful, usable and delightful new products and features for people as well as continually innovating on our existing products.
Responsibilities of User Experience Researcher:
1)Conduct independent research on multiple aspects of products and experiences.
2)Collect and analyze user behavior through lag studies, field visits, ethnography, surveys, benchmark studies, server logs and online experiments.
3)Work w/ designers, product managers, engineers and other User Experience Researchers to prioritize research opportunities in a fast-paced, rapidly changing environment.
4)Understand and incorporate complex technical and business requirements into research.
5)Advocate research findings to diverse audiences through written reports and in-person presentations.
UX Research Methods: Analytics, qualitative usability testing, interviews, large-sample surveys, small-sample surveys, A/B or multivariate testing, card sorting, quantitative usability testing, focus groups, tree testing, eye tracking.
The UX Research Process:
1)Empathize:
2)Define: Using information gathered, define the core problems encountered.
3)Ideate: Begin to design solutions to the core problems being faced.
4)Prototype: To identify the best possible solution for each of the problems identified during the first 3 stages.
5)Test: Used to inform the understanding of the users, the conditions of use, how people think, behave and feel.
State the goal of your website.
1)Locals on the east coast that are into the surf industry and want to stay up-to-date on local surf industry news… give tips/reviews on surfboards
2)Locals on the east coast that want to buy/sell/trade surfboards with each other (Blog)
3)Surf website editor that would want to check out my site and give tips/reviews
*Blog about water pollution and conservation
*Blog about travel tips/guides for certain spots
What questions do you have or problems do you want to solve with your site?
How will I get people to reach it? contact surf shops about promoting their stuff and my buy/sell rentals, put it their rentals on my site
^photographers about posting their stuff and asking about experiences, tips and guides for traveling where they have been
How do make it the best it can be?
What should I post about to gain the most attention/viewing?
Describe your design targets/user personas.
1)Surf shop owners (Reach local surf shops about promoting products & services, also use my buy/sell/trade board blog)
2)Local east coast surf photographers (share their travel stories and photos, connect with other local photographers)
3)Travel bloggers & people wanting to travel or beginners that are interested in the surf industry (Share travel experiences, tips and guides)
What questions do you have about your targets/personas that you want to answer through research?
How can I make my site most useful to them? what topics should I post about that would interest them?
What research methods will you use? Choose a minimum of three.
*I haven’t completed any research yet but have plans to before class on 2/14/19.
I plan on using interviews, large and small-sample interviews, and qualitative and quantitative usability testing.
Will complete the rest below after completing research:
Describe how you executed each of the three research methods.
Describe the results of your research. (If you are doing user testing, make sure the user you test on fits the persona you created)
What did you learn from your research?
What new insights do you have about your users?
How did you apply your learnings to your site based on these learnings and new insights?
Talk about the before and after. How did you adapt your sight to user needs?
What changes do you still hope to make to your site to better serve the user?
