workshop: gathering user insight

UX Review1 4 Insight Techniques

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Four User Insight Techniques in 60 minutes*

* A super-condensed hands-on experience meant to give you an impression rather than teach you to be competent.

KALL Consultingcustomer and user experience design and strategy

1 hour version: 24Jun2013

UX Review2 4 Insight Techniques

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Kall Consulting

We are a User Experience (UX) consultancy.

We help technology and technology-enabled companies ensure that every product offer is a great experience for users, regardless of industry or technology.

What We Do

UX Review3 4 Insight Techniques

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Darren Kall - BioTimeline

HumanEngineeringLabPartners

KALL ConsultingCustomer and User Experience Design and Strategy

School

Work

UX Review4 4 Insight Techniques

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5 Myths of Interviewing

Myth 1: People are good at rating their dissatisfactions and are

prepared to share them.

Myth 2: People are good at knowing the root cause of their

problems.

Myth 3: People are skilled at suggesting ways to improve the

design.

Myth 4: People perceive their own needs well and can

articulate them.

Myth 5: People in interviews tell the truth, the whole truth, and

nothing but the truth.

People are not reliable, and they wing it.

Human nature to confuse correlation with cause.

They are not designers; they are experts in their jobs.

Observers discovers unarticulated needs.

How naïve are you?

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Problem, Solution, Need

What’s the problem? • I need meaningful user feedback to improve my

product / service / concept. I (rightly) feel that

interviewing people who play with it isn’t enough.

What do we do about it?• Gather insight from people in multiple ways, make

sense of the patterns and contradictions, and

transform the discoveries into innovation.

What do we need to get it done?• UX techniques to extract different insights from

users.

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Triangulation

Using two or more methods to study the same point

1. Confidence: It allows you to fix a point in space.

The more alignment among measures, the more

confidence

2. Elephant in the dark: Rely on one measure and

you only believe what you know

3. Contradictions: Contradictions don’t exist. They

only mean that there is something you don’t know

yet

4. Humility: You don’t know as much as you think

you do. Be flexible enough to learn from users

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Onion layers

1.Observation without interfering• ethnographic observation

2.Talk aloud • protocol analysis

3.Questioning in Context• contextual inquiry (not interview)

4.Descriptions • storytelling

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Observation without Interfering – Ethnographic observation

1. Your job: Set up and watch, period!

2. What do you see?

3. How do you know what you know?

4. Hypotheses

5. Questions

6. All about: watching details and making observations

7. Observing a person doing their real job• With or without their awareness

8. Taking detailed notes• Frameworks for collecting observations (Later)

9. Learning: how to observe, how not to interfere, how to

reduce biases for both parties. This takes patience, mindset

and practice.

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Talk Aloud – Protocol Analysis

1. Your job: Prompt them to keep talking, period!

2. All about: listening, and linking to observations

3. Prompt the participant to talk aloud• What they are thinking• What they are about to do• What they are looking for• What has just happened• What are they doing

4. You are building a mental model of how they see the

system.

5. Learning: insight into the triangulation between what you

observe and what the user reports their perceptions and

thoughts are.

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Questioning in Context – Contextual Inquiry

1. Your job: Question for clarity, test your theories, dialog to

collaborate on understanding

2. You are not interviewing them

3. Real person, real tasks, real environment

4. All about: testing hypotheses

5. The participant does their real job, but you interrupt with

clarifying questions.

6. You confirm observations from the first technique

7. You validate the models from the second technique

8. Learning: insight into the details behind the observations

and the self-report of talk-aloud. Requires careful, oblique

questioning.

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Descriptions - Storytelling

1. Your job: Asking for and encouraging open ended

participant story telling

2. Keep the story going

3. Collect a strong narrative

4. All about: gaining perspective, and empathy, through

narratives and story telling.

5. Ask open ended questions:• Why do you do it that way?• Tell me what your day is like?• What do you do just before and after using this product?

6. Encourage participant to recount example stories• Tell me a time when XYZ?

7. Learning: the participant’s perspective that you might not

have thought to ask about, the participant context within

which your observations, models, and theories make sense.

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Thank You

Kall Consulting• info@kallconsulting.com• +1 (937) 516-9503

We’re glad to help your company become more

customer and user-centric.