UX Decoded: Think and Implement User-Centered Research Methodologies, and Expert-Led UX Best Practices

By Dushyant Kanungo

This book aims to provide UX professionals with the information, tools, and techniques they need to apply a user-centric approach to product design. It will show you how to learn about your customers' wants and create products that they will enjoy.
The book takes the reader on a journey that begins with learning to understand user behavior, needs, goals, and pain areas and then develops solutions to those needs. Next, it delves into a thorough examination of several user research methods that aid in discovering user wants and issues areas and mapping strategies used to portray user research results.
The book details a five-stage design process and teaches how to apply problem-first design, design validation methodologies, and numerous user experience benchmarking tools. You also learn to compute UX ROI to properly convey to your business and users why specific UX is excellent for both. This book helps UX professionals utilize the concepts and tools covered in this book to adopt an outside-in approach to design. They first explore and discover user problems and then develop a viable solution.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPB Online LLP
• Release date: Apr 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9789355512222

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction – You’re Not the User

Introduction

One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that ‘you are not the user.’; concludes, Jakob Nielsen, one of the founding fathers in the domain of studying modern user experience design, in his 2006 article titled ‘Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First’.

While the summary of the article states that "Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value ", everyone who has written or read a brief from a client, manager, or product owner would instantly identify with these words.

Still, the need to establish a connection between ‘clear content and simple navigation’ while being told that ‘you are not the user’ never quite goes the distance in practice or gets the due it deserves.

It’s tempting for product teams to make assumptions about who they’re building for. This chapter explores the importance of starting with the user and working backward. Developers, designers, and stakeholders have too much insider knowledge and must step out of their studio to get a grasp of their users’ realities.

Biases restrict startups from succeeding and products from going to market. Embracing the detail from the user research allows companies to earn the right to build products for their customers.

Structure

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

The ivory tower: OECD study results

Different biases, and how to avoid them

Assumptions

Get out of the building concept

Defining user experience

Start with the user and work backward

Objectives

The biggest pitfall of any user experience design exercise remains the fact that often a manager, a client or even a UX practitioner themselves begins to believe that they know everything there is to know about the end users. This assumption has led to numerous failures and caused millions of dollars to go down the drain. The objective of this chapter is to encourage practitioners to take a deep breath and think at least once – what if I am wrong?

We will look at some hard data sources and findings of deep studies before looking at standard (or vanilla) practices to finding the best UX there is for your product or service.

The ivory tower – OECD study results

An ivory tower is a symbolic place—or an atmosphere—where people are happily cut off from the rest of the world in favor of their pursuits, usually mental and esoteric ones.

In the modern-day scenario, it means living in one’s bubble, oblivious to (or refusing to acknowledge) other paths of life and challenges that people face in their lives.

Once we learn to perform a new task, we assume that it should not be difficult for others since we command the new skill at ease. It may have taken us a lot of time and effort, but once we get a hang of it, the sense of ease for the task overshadows the complexities we faced while learning. Riding a bicycle, swimming, driving a car, typing without having to look at the keyboard, playing any musical instrument, juggling three eggs while jumping on a trampoline - if you can do any of this, can you remember the time when you couldn’t? Can everyone do these things? Is there anything on this list that is not feasible to achieve?

Similarly, when we are dwelling on new digital eco-systems, debating about skeuomorphism’s demise, trying out new Git repositories, exploring a new plugin for Sketch, or discussing the latest features and design language upgrades from iOS – remember that not everyone makes a head or tail of what you are talking about.

The skills study

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), published a report in 2016 titled Skills Matter: Further results from the survey of adult skills.

The research focused on data from 2011 to 2015 from the 33 industrialized nations about how technology skills vary among a broad population. The research was aimed at people who are between 16 to 65 years of age. The survey targeted at least 5,000 people in each country to quantify their findings, which meant a total of 2,15,942 participants.

The age range here is a significant factor, as they did the research to measure the digital skills of the workforce, excluding people above 66 years of age. Since it has been pointed may times over countless studies that the elderly come with specific sets of usability needs and have significantly lower skills when it comes to digital interactions, exclusion of this sample demographic means that the general population has even lower skills than presented in the findings of this report.

The tests were conducted on similar toolsets to serve an equal number of complexities to users. Each participant was asked to perform 14 computer-based tasks on simulated software in a controlled testing environment in the user’s preferred language of communication.

The participants were asked to perform tasks with various levels of difficulties. The easiest task had clear instructions to follow, ‘reply to all three people in the mail thread’ - explicit, direct, single step and with a single constraint of three people.

The complex task was to schedule and book a meeting room based on the information gathered from referencing multiple emails in a scheduling application. For many of us who have become accustomed to checking mutually shared calendars and booking meeting rooms with options for virtual participation from people in multiple time zones, this may feel like an everyday