- Ask:
- Interviews: Conversations with stakeholders to understand aspects of their experiences
- Surveys: Questions distributed to large groups of users to elicit attitudes, behaviors and characteristics
- Focus Groups:
- Diary Studies:
- Experience Sampling:
- Observe:
- Ethnographic Observations: Watching people engage in activities to understand how they go about them
- User Testing: Watching people perform specific tasks to see if a system supports them
- Usage analytics: Analyzing large scale traces of system usage to understand patterns of use
- Video analysis:
- Social media mining:
- Inspect:
- Guideline based:Compare a system design against best practices to see how it holds up
- Walkthroughs: step through an interactive sequence using the users-eye-view to find potential breakdowns
- Comparative analysis: compare to existing or similar designs to identify strengths and weaknesses
we often combine the different research methods to get a more robust set of data the question is when to use which type of method
- Ask:
- when observation isn't an option, tasks are infrequent, private or too long to watch
- Values or motivations behind actions are important
- we use surveys when we need input from large numbers of users and we need definite answers
- Observe
- when asking will lead to misinformation (memory, tacit knowledge)
- process & communication, users won't cover every detail when explaining their process.
- analytics when we need large quantities of data
- Inspect
- We have something to inspect, ie doing an as is assessment
- interacting with users is too expensive or difficult
Often times you'll use a combination of the different UX research methods.
