User research
User research is the foundation of the User Experience Design process. It’s how you learn about people and their behaviour in order to design services and products that they need and have a great experiences using.
Why do we need to learn about people and their behaviour?
At each end of a service or piece of technology there are humans trying to get something done.
This is the case whether the technology is old or modern.
Communications devices are an easy example to picture. All of these devices are tools to enable humans to communicate in the moment: a morse code station, an old rotary telephone, a mobile phone or video conferencing software.
The same thing applies for something more complex, for example, someone using a government service or a person applying to attend university.
Who’s using your service or product?
Are they the “perfect user”? Do they understand all your professional terminolgy (jargon) and your organisational structure and processes?
It’s unlikely that they think about your service or organisation or product like you because you’re an expert and you look at it with a depth of understanding that others don’t have. You have a different way of representing it in your mind to the people who use it.
Products and services fall short or even fail when we don’t know how people actually use them, or even who the people using them are.
User research reduces the risk of creating something that falls short or fails
In a human-centred design process we design services and products to meet the needs of the people who will use them.
To meet people’s needs we need to learn who the people using your services and products are, and:
- Their goals and motivations – what exactly are they trying to do?
- Their tasks and challenges – how are they trying to do achieve their goals and can they?
- The context they are in – we need to design a service or product with the context of use in mind.
- For example, a train driver and a passenger might both use a digital display – one of them to drive the train and one of them to use their phone or laptop in transit – two very different contexts of use in the same location.
User research happens all the way through the human-centred design process
The focus and techniques depend on whether you’re at the start, in the middle or at the end of creating your service or product.
- At the start: Research before you start designing means that you get an understanding of what your target group needs. Meeting real user needs increases the chances that your service or product will succeed.
- In the middle: Iterative tests of ideas that meet people’s needs before and during development ensures that the you don’t drift off track with the user experience.
- At the end: Measuring the effectiveness of your design after your product or service is released will ensure seamless, intuitive interactions that produce something people enjoy using.
Arming yourself with this powerful 3-step process means that every dimension of your service or product will have been considered, analysed, and tested before it meets an end-user ‘in the wild’.
Which will provide you with greater confidence that you’re producing the right thing, in the right way, avoiding high support needs or expensive re-development.
After meeting exact user needs comes simplicity and elegance that produce products that are a joy to own, a joy to use.
Don Norman
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