User Experience

Research and Design

Week 3 – Session 4
Techniques for Designing UX : Understanding
 LEARNING OUTCOMES

LO2: Apply techniques for designing User Experience in

System Development
 OUTLINE
User Research
Requirements
Participative Design
Interviews
Questionnaires
Probes
Card sorting techniques
Working with groups
User Research
User Research

User research focuses on

understanding user behaviors,
needs, and motivations The types of user research
through observation you can or should perform
techniques, task analysis, and
other feedback methodologies.
will depend on the type of
Mike Kuniaysky further notes site, system or app you are
that it is “the process of developing, your timeline,
understanding the impact of and your environment.
design on an audience.”
( www.usability.gov)

. From these proposals,

User research is an
design solutions are
iterative, cyclical process
prototyped and then
in which observation
tested with the target user
identifies a problem space
group. This process is
for which solutions are
repeated as many times as
proposed
necessary.
User Research

Source : https://userresearch.blog.gov.uk/
User Research
 Basic Steps of User Research

1. Define primary user groups.

This involves creating a framework that describes the main types of users you’re designing for—
allowing you to focus your efforts in recruiting users for research.
2. Plan for user involvement.
This includes choosing one or more techniques for involving user groups in research, based on the
needs of your project.
3. Conduct the research.
We’ll cover the basic techniques here, such as interviews and surveys, and provide tips on how to go
about them.
4. Validate your user group definitions.
Using what you learned from the research, you can solidify your user groups model. This model will
then serve as a platform for the development of more detailed tools, such as personas.
5. Generate user requirements.
These are statements of the features and functions that the site may include. Add to business
requirements and prioritize them to become project requirements
 Define Your User groups

• Is a group of people that will be used as a resource of the research process, which
is expected to provide complete and accurate information in accordance with its
capacity.
• A company’s primary.com site might include the following user groups:
a) potential purchaser,
b) current purchasers,
c) partners,
d) and job seekers.
• Defining groups for user research, you’ll start prioritizing user groups in more detail
 Define Your User groups

The basic steps for defining your user groups:

1. Create a list of attributes that will help you define the different users of your site.
2. Discuss the attributes with those at the company who have contact with relevant types of users (for
example, customers)
3. Prioritize the attributes that seem to have the largest impact on why and how a potential user would
use your site or application
4. Define the user groups that you will focus on in research and design
Use brainstorming techniques to help you collect these attributes and how to prioritize and
model them.

Any user groups that exist within the site "www.Binus.edu"?

 List of Attributs

Potential sources for creating list of attributes :

• Documents explaining company strategies, such as company goals, competitive information,
marketing strategies, and business plans
• Market segmentations of current customers and other demographic data gathered by the
marketing department
• Previously conducted user research
• surveys, such as user satisfaction surveys and feedback forms
• Customer service reports covering frequently occurring issues
• Identify people within the organization who have some insight into current or
prospective users.
 General Questions to User groups
Ask the group to think of the different types of potential users they tend to interact with.
Then ask them to list some of the common attributes they’ve encountered. Here are some
examples of what could vary:
• Primary goals, as they relate to the subject matter of your site. For example, purchasing an item, trading
a stock, or getting a specific question answered are common goals.
• Roles. The roles of user groups as job seekers, support seekers, potential clients, and so on.
• Demographics, including age, sex, family (single, married, children), income level, and region
• Experience including the level of education, level of familiarity with relevant technologies, level of
subject matter expertise, and frequency of usage
• Organizational attributes, including the size of the company users work for, their department, type of
job, tenure, and work patterns
• Additional Q: Current frequency of trading, Number of product types traded, Level of
subject-matter expertise, Level of technical savvy etc
Example attributes
Requirements
 Understanding requirements
• A requirement is ‘something the product must do or a quality that the product
must have’ (Robertson and Robertson, 1999). Designers will study current
activities and gather stories of use and soon will have generated a great deal of
information about the current situation and about people’s goals and aspirations.
• There has always been much debate about which of the following terms should be
used for the requirements activity:
a) Requirements gathering, which suggests requirements are lying around waiting to be
picked up with little interaction between designer and stakeholders
b) Requirements generation, which suggests a more creative activity, that tends to de-
emphasize links to current practice
c) Requirements elicitation, which suggests some interaction between stakeholders and
designers
d) Requirements engineering - often used in software engineering projects, usually a very
formal approach.
Understanding requirements
 Prioritizing requirements
• One way of doing this is by using the ‘MoSCoW rules’. These classify
requirements into:
1) Must have - fundamental requirements without which the system will be
unworkable and useless, effectively the minimum usable subset
2) Should have - would be essential if more time were available, but the
system will be useful and usable without them
3) Could have - of lesser importance, therefore can more easily be left out of
the current development
4) Want to have but Won’t have this time round - can wait till a later
development
Participative design
 Participative design
Research work involves using a variety of
techniques to understand and analyze someone
else’s needs, goals, and aspirations. The key thing
for designers to remember is that they are not the
people who will be using the final system.
Designers need to understand the requirements of
other people.
Participative
design
Interviews
 Interviews
• One of the most effective ways of finding out what people want and what problems they have at the
moment is to talk to them! Interviews with all the various stakeholders in the domain are a vital way of
gathering stories. Designers employ a range of different styles of interviews.
• The structured interview uses questions that are developed beforehand. The interview follows the
wording exactly. Public opinion polls, for example of the sort produced in great numbers before
elections, are normally based on structured interviews.
• Here is an extract from a structured interview pro forma about a student information system.
Intervie
ws
Interviews
 Stories, scenarios and early
prototyping in interviewing
• Scenarios and stories are helpful aids in understanding activities and help
avoid having people imagine (or reconstruct) situations in the abstract.
• Once there is a rough idea of what the new technology might do,
discussing a scenario will highlight many issues, from the naming of
individual functions to the impact of changes in work practice.
Prototypes – anything from paper sketches to semi-functioning products
– are very often used to embody scenarios in possible technology.
• Whether or not a prototype is used, the analyst and the customer ‘walk
through’ the scenario, while the analyst probes for comments, problems,
possible alternatives, and suggestions in general.
 Think-aloud commentaries

When it is necessary to
know a good deal of It is important to
low-level detail about This data, properly remember, however, The description of the
current technology, termed a Verbal that by imposing the ‘contextual interview’
Further, not all
users can be asked to protocol’ (Ericsson requirement to in Beyer and
cognitive processes
talk through the and Simon, 1985), generate a Holtzblatt (1998)
can be accessed by
operations concerned - can provide helpful commentary you are suggests some ways
the conscious mind.
including their internal indications of current interfering with the of alleviating this
cognitive processes - as problems. very process you are problem.
they use the technology attempting to study.
in question.
 Preparation

Keeping track of the interview

Practical Telling stories

considerations in
interviewing Reflection and exploration

General-purpose exploratory questions

When to stop
Questionnaires
 Questionnaires
• Questionnaires are one way of streamlining the understanding process if a large
number of people are to be surveyed and resources are not available to
interview them individually. However, constructing a workable questionnaire is
surprisingly difficult and time-consuming.
• Questionnaires are ideally suited to gathering a large amount of quantifiable
data, or to capture responses from people who cannot be involved more directly.
• A good questionnaire is time-consuming to construct so that all the items:
a) are understandable
b) are unambiguous
c) collect data that actually answers evaluation questions
d) can be analyzed easily.
 Response rates to questionnaires can be very low indeed
- return rates of under 10 per cent are common if the
intended respondents have no particular stake in the
design of the technology or incentive (being entered into
a prize draw, for example) to participate.

Questionnair Perceptions of system design are often collected through

es rating scales, known as Likert scales (Likert, 1932). The
Likert scale is the most common of a number of methods
for eliciting opinion.

Another approach is to devise ‘bipolar’ rating scales,

often called semantic differentials. These derive from the
work of Osgood (Osgood et ai, 1957) and have evolved
into a very powerful way of uncovering the feelings
people have towards ideas, products and brands.
Questionnaires
Probes
 Probes
Probes are collections of artefacts designed to elicit requirements, ideas or opinions in specific
contexts. ‘Cultural probes’ were developed by Bill Gaver and colleagues (Gaver et al., 1999) in
working with elderly people located in three European cities. The overall aim was to design
technologies that would foster greater participation in the community by older people.

The philosophy behind cultural probes was rather different than trying to gather
requirements and illustrates well the difference between requirements elicitation and
requirements generation.

Technology probes are another form of probe that were used to gather requirements for home
technologies and the area has now evolved into a whole area of ‘probology.
Card sorting techniques
 Card sorting techniques

Probes are collections of artefacts

designed to elicit requirements, ideas The philosophy behind Technology probes are
or opinions in specific contexts. cultural probes was rather another form of probe that
‘Cultural probes’ were developed by Bill different than trying to gather were used to gather
Gaver and colleagues (Gaver et al.,
1999) in working with elderly people requirements and illustrates requirements for home
located in three European cities. The well the difference between technologies and the area has
overall aim was to design technologies requirements elicitation and now evolved into a whole
that would foster greater participation
in the community by older people. requirements generation. area of ‘probology.
Card sorting techniques
 Card sorting techniques
An open card sort starts with
blank cards and participants
are asked to write down the A closed card sort starts with
objects or actions they think predefined categories and
are important in some asks participants to place
domain. These are then objects into the categories.
gathered together into
categories

There are
two types
of card
sort:
Card sorting techniques
 Card sorting techniques
• A cluster analysis such as this can be used to produce a dendrogram,
which shows the hierarchical clustering of objects (or actions).
Representations such as these can then be used in a reverse card
sorting (or tree sorting) method to see how the hierarchy is traversed
for different tasks.
• Analysts really need to practice card sorting to understand the type of
insight it can provide and when best to use the technique. A hard part
of this is knowing what to sort, which objects or actions to include
and when in the overall understanding process the technique will be
most helpful.
Card sorting techniques
Working with groups
 Working with groups
• An alternative to asking individuals or stimulating individuals to provide information is to
work with groups of people. The most common example of this is the focus group.
• Here a group of people are posed questions by facilitators and encouraged to react to each
other’s comments. If they are part of a group, people can be asked to describe how they
cooperate to manage activities.
• Many techniques have been developed to support focus groups. One such example is CARD
(Collaborative Analysis of Requirements and Design, Tudor et al, 1993; Muller, 2001).
• Used by Microsoft and Lotus among others, CARD uses physical playing cards with which a
group can lay out, modify and discuss the flow of an activity. In the analysis phase, each pre-
formatted card contains people’s accounts of what is done and why for an individual
component of the activity. Requirements on innovations in human practices or technologies
can then be discussed around the cards. CARD is also intended to support design and
evaluation.
 Brainstorming
• Another important group activity is brainstorming. Once again there is
a wealth of good advice from management consultants and system
designers about how to organize and structure brainstorming
sessions. Brainstorming sessions should be fun to participate in, but to
achieve this they require an experienced facilitator.
 REFERENCES
• Benyon, David. (2019). Designing User Experience: A guide to HCI, UX
and interaction design (4th Edition). 04. Pearson. United Kingdom.
ISBN-13: 978-1292155517. Chapter 7
• Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler. (2012). A Project Guide to UX
Design: for User Experience Designers in the Field or in The Making.
02. New Riders. Berkeley, CA. ISBN: 978-0-321-81538-5. Chapter 6