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Week 3: Structuring a Research Project
Researching the User

Effective Web Design and Strategy
Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Taxonomy, Revisited

Small Group
Closed Sort
3-5 groupings

Small Group
Discussion

Group
Presentations

Affinity
Groups

Papers

Papers
• No 10s for the written paper
• No 16s for the presentations
• Average of 7 on reaction papers
• Average of 11 on presentations
• That’s a c- for the class
• We’re going to get better
/Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101

Comp 101
Proofing Marks (my style)

• ¶: Paragraph Break
• ^: Insert
• → ←[arrows]:Transpose or move
• Delete/Remove
• w.c.—word choice
• w.w.—wrong word
• ref. or unc. ref—unclear referent
• p.v. or passive—passive verb
• trans.—weak or missing transition
• prep.—prepositional ending or clause /Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Proofing Marks (my style)

• : Pre-writing or start here
• agree—agreement (n/v or tense)
/Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Overall Writing/Presenting Concerns

• Basic Grammar
• Agreement
• Hyphenated Terms
• Prepositional clauses (multiple/stacked, and buried adjectives)
• Passive verbs
• Strong, sentences that do their work
• Argument structure
• Sentences
• Paragraphs
• Thesis. Organizing Principle(s). POV /Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Basic Grammar
• Noun/Verb Agreement
• “Size guides allows the user to convert UK sizes to...American
sizes.”
• Hyphenated Terms
• Two or more adjectives before a noun that act as one idea
(one-thought adjectives) are connected with a hyphen.
• stress free experience
• stress-free experience
• multiple step process
• multi-step process /Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Basic Grammar
• Referents
• A word that refers to another
• He
• She
• It
• Hers
• This
/Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Prepositional Clauses
• Prepositions. What are they?
• Locators in time and place
• Of, to, in, aboard, below, above, at, behind, beyond,
/Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Prepositional Clauses
• In place of a modifier
• Adobe also improved the way InDesign sends alerts about
problems with the layout...”
• Adobe also improved the way InDesign sends alerts about
layout problems
• Adobe also improved InDesign’s layout alerts
• “A large tent at the main entrance to the stadium
• A large tent at the main stadium entrance
/Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Passive Verbs
• Forms of the verb “to be”
• Present Tense
• I am/We are
• You are
• He/She/It is
• Past Tense
• I was/We were
• You were
• He/She/It was
/Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Passive Verbs
• Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than
passive verbs
• Examples
• The professor is teaching the students.
• The professor teaches the students
• “There were also other changes I quickly saw.”
• I quickly noticed other changes.
• “Reviews of the new edition lamented that there was nothing
groundbreaking.”
• Reviews of the new edition lamented the lack of
groundbreaking updates.” /Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Argument Structure
• Meta Paper/Argument Structure
• What I’m going to tell you
• I tell you
• What I told you
• Argument Structure
• Thesis > Support/Pt. 1 > Support/Pt. 2 > Support/Pt. 3 > Conclusion
• Introduction > Para > Para > Para > Conclude
• Paragraph Structure
• Logical transition, introduce paragraph thesis
• Support paragraph thesis through sentences /Belman/Spring 2010

Comp 101
Argument Structure
• Clauses are the building blocks of sentences
• Sentences are a unit of idea, and are the building blocks of
paragraphs
• Paragraphs are a single unit or idea, and are the building blocks of
arguments/opinions/papers/presentations
• Make sure you are arguing something, making a point, saying
something:
• In your papers
• In your presentations
• In your experience designs
/Belman/Spring 2010

STRUCTURING A RESEARCH
PROCESS

Research Process
Website Development Process

• Morville & Rosenfeld suggest:
/Belman/Spring 2010

Research Process

• Morville & Rosenfeld suggest:
• Research
• Strategy
• Design
• Implementation
• Administration
/Belman/Spring 2010

Research Process
Discovery Strategy
+ + Design Development
Research Definition & Integration
Training,
Runtime
Optimization Deployment Migration,
Management
Testing

Research Process
Process: Phase 1
Discovery
• Goals and Output
+ • Expectation Setting and Relationship Building
Research
• Audience, Brand, and Business Deep-Dive
• Definition of Goals, Objectives, Success Metrics
• Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking
• Baselining

Research Process
Process: Phase 2
Strategy • Goals and Output

+
• Long-Term Development Strategy
Definition
• User Experience Definition
• Technical Strategy and Specification
• Platform Identification and Selection
• UX Requirements and Specifications
• Content and Editorial Strategy

Research Process
Process: Phase 3
Design • Content Development
• Aesthetic Development (Look and Feel)
• Template Design and Production
• Build Specifications
• Production Plan and Budget

Research Process
Process: Phase 4
Development
& Integration • Site Framework Development
• Site Framework Integration
• Framework Testing

Research Process
Process: Phase 5
Training,
Migration, • Staff Training
Testing
• Site Population/Migration
• Pre-Launch Testing

Research Process
Process: Phase 6
Deployment • Installation
• User Acceptance Testing
• Beta Launch
• Documentation

Research Process
Process: Phase 7
Runtime
Management • Administration
• Optimization
• Testing
• Improvement

Research Process
Discovery Strategy
+ + Design Development
Research Definition & Integration
Training,
Runtime
Optimization Deployment Migration,
Management
Testing

Research Process
Discovery and Research Process
Discovery
• Morville & Rosenfeld suggest their research framework
+
Research

Research Process

• Morville & Rosenfeld Framework
• Context
• Content
• Users

Research Process

• Wodtke and Govella Framework
• User (“User base”)
• Business Need (“Business”)
• Materials (“Technology,” “Platforms,” “Content”)

Research Process

• Context
• Background research
• Presentations and meetings
• Stakeholder interviews
• Technology assessment
• Content
• Users

Research Process

• Context
• Content
• Heuristic evaluation
• Metadata and content analysis
• Content mapping
• Benchmarking
• Users

Research Process

• Context
• Content
• Users
• Search log and click stream analysis
• Use cases and personas
• Surveys
• Contextual inquiry (focus groups, ethnographic study)
• User interviews and testing (interviews, card sorting,

usability testing)
Research Process

Morville & Rosenfeld Wodtke + Govella Belman/JHU
• Context • Users • Business
• Content • Business • Brand
• Users • Materials • Landscape
• Competition
• Current Site
• Audience/Users
• Content
• Technology

Research Process

Morville & Rosenfeld Wodtke + Govella Belman/JHU
• Context • Users • Business
• Content • Business • Brand
• Users • Materials • Landscape
• Competition
• Current Site
• Audience/Users
• Content
• Technology

Research Process
Audiences and Users

• Users in 5 Simple Steps (Wodtke + Govella)
• Discover who the target user is
• Talk to the target user
• Design for the target user
• Test a prototype with the user
• Test the final site with the user

Research Process
Audiences and Users


Research Process
Audiences and Users

• Two types of users or stakeholders
• Stakeholder (Boutelle): “Individuals or organizations who stand
to gain or lose from the success or failure of a system.”
• Internal or Business Stakeholders
• External or User Stakeholders

Research Process
Audiences and Users

• Two types of users or stakeholders
• Stakeholder (Boutelle): “Individuals or organizations who stand
to gain or lose from the success or failure of a system.”
• Internal or Business Stakeholders
• External or User Stakeholders

Research Process
Audiences and Users

• Posit the segmentation
• Research against posited external user segmentation
• Redefine/codify segmentation and define for design/build

Research Process
Audiences and Users: Segmentation

• Types of Segmentation (Pre-User Research, from Client, non-UCD)
• Formal/Functional Roles
• Informal/Use Roles

Research Process

• Types of Segmentation (Pre-User Research, from Client)
• Formal/Functional Roles (Non-profit)
• Academics (teachers, researchers, librarians)
• Business (companies, consultants, associations)
• Civil society (NGOs, foundations)
• Government
• Media
• Investors/Funders

Research Process

• Informal/Use Roles (Non-profit)
• Opinion Leaders
• Influencers
• Decision Makers
• Partners
• Public

Research Process

• Formal Roles (For-profit)
• Current customers
• Past customers
• Prospective customers

Research Process

• Informal/Use Roles (For-profit)
• Hard-core customer/user
• One-time customer
• Inclined customer

Research Process
Audiences and Users: Toward UCD Segmentation

• Types of Segmentation (Baty)

Research Process

• Types of Segmentation (Baty)
• Market Segmentation
• Experience Lifecycle
• Mental Models
• Capability Levels
• Mood
• Game Style Play

Research Process

• Market Segmentation
• Based on segmenting by similar product or service needs
• Focused on purchasing/action triggers and barriers
• EX: Diapers
• Mother of 0-3 month old infant, 30-35 years old, married, 2
earners, HHI $110K+
• Mother of 0-3 month old infant, 21-25 years old, married, 1
earner, HHI $65K

Research Process

• Lifecycle of a consumer’s experience with a brand during a
discrete experience or across the life-long relationship
• EX: Airline Flight
• Pre-flight
• Flight
• Post-flight

Research Process

• Lifecycle of a consumer’s experience with a brand during a
discrete experience or across the life-long relationship
• EX: Planned Parenthood
• 17-year-old information seeker
• 17-year-old immediate-service seeker
• 21-year-old health-care service seeker (no insurance)
• 25-year-old prospective advocate
• 26-year-old advocate
• 40-year-old supporter

Research Process

• Mental Models
• Focused on how users imagine or “expect” behaviors within a
context.

Research Process

• Capability Levels
• Different levels of expertise
• Can be interaction based
• EX: First-time user >> Novice >> Intermediate user >> Expert
• Can be knowledge-based
• EX: World Bank (Casual browser, Sophisticated Browser,
Power User)

Research Process

• Mood (or frame of mind)
• Information gathering
• Comparison shopping
• Purchase intent

Research Process

• Game Style Play
• Escape
• Socialization
• Mindless entertainment
• Challenge

Research Process

• No one segmentation model or framework is correct
• They are only frameworks for thinking about your users.
• But the frames are important, critical
• They “frame the way we approach solving our problems.” (Baty)
• They provide a common reference point for supporting or
challenging decisions in IA, design, content, tone, technology:
everything that defines our experience design
• They start out as guides; they become yardsticks.

Research Process
Audiences and Users


Research Process
Tools for UCD Segments & Building User Profiles

• Or User Inquiry Exercises/Approaches/Processes

Research Process

• Or User Inquiry Exercises/Approaches/Processes
• Surveys
• Ethnographic Research
• Focus Groups
• Interviews (1:1)
• Contextual Inquiry
• Usability Testing
• Web Analytics

Research Process

Surveys. Ethnography. Focus Groups. 1:1 Interviews. Contextual
Inquiry. Usability Testing. Analytics.
• PROS
• Provides quantitative and qualitative data
• Efficient and inexpensive
• Flexible
• CONS
• Superficial
• Respondents might not understand questions.
• Good for baselining current site
Research Process

• Similar to what you saw in the IDEO shopping cart research
• Go into the field and see what people do, not what they say
• Provides real-world insights into actions and behaviors
• Time and resource intensive

Research Process

• Small group of people (usually 5-8)
• React to ideas and designs that are shown to them.
• It’s a group process
• Value comes from participants reacting to each other’s
opinions.
• Good for quickly getting a sampling of user’s opinions and
feelings about things.
• For early in a design process. Won’t tell you if people can use a
site.
Research Process

• Good for determining user wants, needs, and likes.

Research Process

• Good for gaining insights into opinions, thoughts, and ideas
• Better than ethnographic studies for exploring ideas and
motivations behind actions and behaviors
• Lower cost
• Critical for internal stakeholder relationship management/
building
• Useful for understanding tasks/needs, seeking behavior,
lifecycle relationships, brand relationship

Research Process

• Combines ethnographic studies/observation with interview
questioning
• Gets participants to explain their actions
• Costly and time-consuming

Research Process

• Provides insight on site/product/value proposition and usability
• Two types of testing, says Krug
• Get It? Testing
• Show a tester a site, and see if they get it. Do they get the
value proposition, the organization, how the site works....
• Key Task Testing
• Ask the user to do something, then watch them try to
accomplish the task
• Tie tasks to audience segments and key tasks
Wednesday, February 17, 2010 •
Research Process

• Multiple appropriate points for testing in process
• Research/Strategy
• Design
• Pre- and Post-Launch
• Different types of testing
• Low-fidelity (paper)
• Mid (wireframes, clickable prototype)
• High-fidelity (working software)
Research Process

• How users are currently using the site, not how they might be
using it
• Good for optimizing today. Not good for imagining a different
tomorrow.

Deeper Dive on UCD Research:
Interviewing + Usability Testing

Research Process
Interviewing
• 1:1 Interviews (Boutelle, Beavers, Conan)
• Interviewing is both art and science (Beavers)
• Identify and recruit stakeholders, internal and external, across
• Multiple levels and departments.
• Multiple audience segments
• Interviews should provide information on brand, business,
users/tasks, and more
• Be open to add new interviews to your list
• Use an org chart as a guide, not as a list of interviews. You
need to talk to the MarCom department, but not necessarily to
the head of the department
• After interviews are over, keep stakeholders in the loop.
Research Process
Interviewing: Step-by-Step
• 1:1 Interviews (Conan)
• Prepare.
• Read Always. Read broadly. Tune your Ear
• Pre-write questions; not because you’ll use them, but
because it helps prepare you and comfort you as an
interviewer
• Keep questions short, keep the conversation moving
• Swim/drown/breathe in your material. “As you’re coming to
work, as you’re eating breakfast, as you’re drinking coffee,
think about...the interview….”
• Build your questions as a narrative, with transitions.

Research Process
• Persevere.
• Ask for subjects to make the abstract concrete. You’re
looking to really understand.
• Follow up on questions (Conan doesn’t say this; Belman
says it). If you don’t understand something, ask again.
• If you don’t get an answer to your question, rephrase it, and
tell them you’re rephrasing it, so they don’t think you’re
repeating yourself.
• Ask difficult questions. Tell them you know it’s difficult, but it
has to be answered. “What do you do poorly?” “Where do
you, as a business, fail?” “What drives you crazy?

Research Process
• Be Engaged.
• “Listen incredibly carefully. “ Don’t be the notetaker. You’re
the listener. The one who is controlling, managing, driving
and steering the narrative and the conversation.
• “Listen, and they will tell you what the next question is”
• Make them feel like you are really engaged, interested, and
learning.
• Make them feel like they’ve learned through the interview
too.

Research Process
• Be Flexible.
• “Expect to adapt and change” course in an interview.
• You’re following the narrative, the thought, the
collaboratively created path forward.
• Don’t stick blindly to your script, or you will fail.
• Improvise transitions to move through your must ask
questions.
• “You have to be willing to abandon your plans and go in a
new direction at the drop of a hat.”
• “Get rid of them at the 30.” Or, end the interview before the
hour is up.
Research Process
• Embrace the Role: You need to be a Charming Ringmaster.
• Keep it Civil.: If you’re managing a large group in an
interview, disagreement is useful to get to resolution, yelling
is not useful.
• “The most corrosive thing that you have to worry about….is
boredom.” Don’t let it happen:
• Pick up the pace.
• Become more entertaining and charming
• Short sharp questions
• Ask more personal questions
• Change tack
Research Process
• Get a Good Night’s Sleep
• Interviews should be scary and intellectually difficult. You
should feel exhausted after them.
• Preparation may be mechanical, but interviewing should
never be mechanical. It should be scary and exhilarating.
• Interviewing is performing. It’s not a task. It’s an art.

Usability Testing

Research Process
Documenting User Profiles

• Narrative User Profile
• Use Cases (functional)
• Personas (low and high-fidelity)

Research Process
Documenting User Profiles: Narrative

Research Process
Documenting User Profiles: Low-Fidelity Personas

Research Process

Research Process

Research Process
Documenting User Profiles: High-Fidelity Personas

Research Process

Research Process

Next Week
• Phil Kemelor presentation on analytics and usage
/Belman/Spring 2010

Next Week
1 2 3 4
8 7 6 5
/Belman/Spring 2010

Next Week
Discovery
Research
Discovery
Optimize
Research
/Belman/Spring 2010

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Week 3: Structuring a Research Project

Researching the User

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Proofing Marks (my style)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Proofing Marks (my style)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Overall Writing/Presenting Concerns

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Website Development Process

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Website Development Process

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Website Development Process

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

• Definition of Goals, Objectives, Success Metrics

• Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Strategy • Goals and Output

• Technical Strategy and Specification

• Platform Identification and Selection

• UX Requirements and Specifications

• Content and Editorial Strategy

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

• Template Design and Production

• Production Plan and Budget

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Website Development Process

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Discovery and Research Process

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Discovery and Research Process

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Discovery and Research Process

• Materials (“Technology,” “Platforms,” “Content”)

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Discovery and Research Process

• Presentations and meetings

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Discovery and Research Process

• Metadata and content analysis