Opinion: Nuances in UX Research

With several practices of art and science, often, there are two paths to mastery. One is of the theoretical nature, involving reading texts and amassing knowledge. The other is experience, either through professional practice or personal indulgence. If textual knowledge teaches the fundamentals tenets of arts and sciences, experience takes us closer to understanding the various nuances involved within them.

This is no less true with the ever-proliferating universe of UX design and research. Maybe more so, actually. There are emergent tools and methods that have now been conventionally adopted for the several elements of UX, including user research, interaction and interface design, usability testing, and iterative research & design. At the same time, I've come to believe that UX practitioners find a niche of tools and methods that help them find those aforementioned subtler nuances. But why nuances? Because they help add a wealth of detail to the insights that guide user-centered research and design. They also help one tap those much talked-about intangible facets of UX like empathy. 

There are several nuances to conducting UX research. Photo by David Travis on Unsplash

​In this space, I wanted to explore a few such tools and methods that I've found quite useful and effective in my UX research and design practice. The list of these tools/methods follows -

• Shadowing - In the user research phase, the value of insights extracted from users needs no introduction, specially given the universal constraints of cost, time, and consent. As such, interviews and focus groups have always been handy tools. But shadowing, I find, has an extra edge. Job shadow programs have traditionally been adopted in industries as a useful training tool to let new employees get quickly into the shoes of their peers and superiors. Shadowing has the advantage of taking researchers into the direct physical space that users occupy when they engage with the product or service of interest. This naturally allows researchers to have a good deal of contextual understanding about their users. Context greatly influences the way users interact with products or services and this is a great way to estimate the limitations and capacities of the user's usual context, if not, the universal context. The researcher might walk away not only learning what the user's needs are but also the whys behind them. 
• Reactions - Harking back to Sir Newton's age old law of physics, every interaction between the user and a product does invoke a reaction in the user. Of course, the way this is reflected is widely variant among the user population. I've found it a good trick to try and capture these user reactions during shadowing or any other user research and usability testing exercise. Capturing videos or audios of the exercises has always been a traditional tool and so have been tools like heat maps and eye tracking. As part of these, it simply helps to match user interactions with their reactions. This truly helps understand how a user feels when interacting with a product and helps the researcher develop empathy for the user. 

How a user reacts while using a product is as important as how the product is used. Photo by Ana Tavares on Unsplash

• Interpretation - I've heard and read from practitioners, in a slight foreboding note, not to take user insights quite literally. I'm sure this opens up a debate with strong contentions from either side. But it does help to keep oneself open to interpretations; for the various inputs that users provide, particularly in the user research phase. A basic way to begin doing this is to translate research findings and user expressed needs into at-least one possible need in each of the different contexts applicable to the user. This is where aforementioned methods like shadowing come in handy as one comes back with a clear estimate of these contexts.
• Mind-mapping - As the different contexts of a user get established and the notes from research begin to emerge, I've found myself going back to mind-mapping as a consistent tool, irrespective of the research phase. This lets me lay out all the information on a drawing board, and start connecting the different pieces of data. This not only adds weight to each piece of data by giving it presence but also lets the researchers and designers obtain a systemic view of the project's constituent elements with respect to the user. Often one can get too caught up with the details and loose sight of the overall scheme of things and the relative importances of different solutions to the detailed design needs. Besides, mind-maps are beautiful networks that help in detecting patterns of evidence that throw light on a certain design need envisioned by several users; or on certain design elements that need to be retained or discarded for enhanced user experience.

• Storytelling - Talk of patterns of evidence, networks, and contexts brings me to a method that I'd recently stumbled upon and found great use for. And I think this is definitely a very selective method applicable for a specific type of projects; ones where the users need to interact with software applications while going through a scenario, a story, or a journey. In projects like these, the onus is quite high on design research to come up with strategy, both for the content and the design, in such a way that it evokes this sense of a story, scenario, or journey. One good way to do that, my design team realized recently, would actually be to let the users being researched tell stories. Stories, that in different angles, relate to the core aspect of the need that the software application aims to address. These stories could be elaborate accounts of their journeys. They could also be little vignettes that hint at the need the app is designed for. What we've realized is that these vignettes lead to content that can be, via mind-maps, categorized and analyzed into guiding the content strategy and the interface design.

​Some of these tools might simply aid in understanding the next step during the UX design and research process. And some of them might help in handling the nuances that remain intangible. What I hope, is that these tools/methods lead to a better understanding of some much needed philosophies that UX, as a science and an art, will embrace: like Empathy.