Planning user research on mobile devices

Chi Chung Tsang

What will research tell you?

• Users’ goals and tasks

• Users’ knowledge and skills

• Users’ expectations

• Users’ attitudes and behaviours

• Users’ language and vocabulary

• Barriers users face

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• Gaps and opportunities in the market

• The right target audience for your product

• The value of your product proposition to the target market

• Issues and problems with your design

Research can help you

• Design for users’ actual wants & needs

• Reduce the time and resources needed to design & develop

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Context in user research

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User research is about understanding how context affects the experience

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Human - Human Human - Computervs

1. On the bus, on your way to work

2. At a coffee shop, on your own, during your lunch break

3. At the dentist, while you wait in a waiting room full of people

4. At home, relaxing in the garden, on a Saturday afternoon

Exercise: How does reading on a smartphone change in these situations?

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Research toolbox

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Research toolbox

Card sortingContextual research

Cultural probes

Focus groupsA/B Testing Diary studies

Eye tracking Shadowing Task analysis InterviewsUsability testing

Service safari

Think aloud protocol

ObservationCognitive

walkthroughGuerrilla research

Survey/questionnaire

Tree testing

Competitor review

Staff researchHeuristic

evaluationFirst click

testingAnalytics Ethnography

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Dan Brown, Communicating Design

Choose activities for your project based on their ability to take you closer to an objective, not because you want to make a particular kind of output ”

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Guerrilla research

Challenges to guerrilla research

• Location and permissions

• Time can be short and not guaranteed

• Lighting

• Network quality

• Incentives

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• Limited screening of participants

• Confidence to approach participants

• Difficult to record

• Choosing the device to use

Planning your research

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Roadmap for research

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Collect your data Present your findings

Plan your approachData analysis and

interpretation

Who are your users?

What is it you want to know?

What is it you want to know?

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Research objectives

Ways to meet your objectives

What are you trying to find out?

• Who should answer your research questions?

• Where are you going to find them?

• How are you going to recruit them?

Who are your users?

Recruiting participants• Define your recruitment criteria

• Age, gender, geographic location, occupation, other considerations

• Draw up a screener - can be in the form of an online questionnaire

• Recruit via professional recruitment companies, friends of friends and colleagues, site calls to action, social media

• Avoid digital professionals and anyone from the sector of the product you are researching

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Plan your approach• Which topics do you want to cover?

• Which methods are appropriate? In which order?

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Research plan

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Why create a research plan?

• Act as a reference during research sessions - especially useful for large research projects or if your on multiple projects at once

• A documented agreement with clients outlining what is covered in the research

In your groups, create a research plan for the following scenario:

• Citymapper wants to improve their service offering in the near future. In order to do this, they want you to help them understand how users are using their app and suggest any improvements they could make

Agree on your research objectives, questions, users and approach.

Exercise: Create your research plan

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Find someone from another group to run your research on. After 5 minutes, switch with each other.

Exercise: Run your research

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