Introduction To AgileUX Fundamentals of Customer Research

Introduction

To AgileUX:

Fundamentals of

Customer Research

Will Evans

@semanticwill


Yana Kuchirko

@mslogophiliac

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

2

“
Insight about customer behavior and
work patterns were never discovered
sitting at your fucking desk.
”


Why Customer Research

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

3

Product development shouldn’t
happen in a vacuum

You need to know about your product
in context:
you are not the user

You need to observe your customers
in context:
lab settings aren’t reality

Surveys and focus groups can be
problematic:
bias is everywhere

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

4

The tendency, especially in
design and product development
processes, to believe everyone
uses digital technologies exactly
like you do.

Andres Glusman

Malkovich

Bias

Why research

is essential

“
Customers are terrible at
articulating what they do. When
asked what they do, people give their
impression of what they do
—
which is
usually horseshit
”

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

5

AgileUX Customer Research

Specific Context:

Product designed for the environment
in
which people
will utilize it.

Specific Users:

People for whom the product is designed.

Specific Goals:

The Product goals align with the customers’
goals.


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Types of AgileUX Customer Research

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Contextual Inquiry

Task Analysis

Card Sorting

Focus Groups

Surveys

Usability Testing

Research helps

pose questions

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What are the needs of people’s
environment?

How do people actually get their job done?

How do we understand the
real

environment people live and work in?

What tools do they use to accomplish
goals?

What don’t I know that I don’t know?

What is

Contextual Inquiry?

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

9

Contextual inquiry is a field data
-
gathering
technique that
studies a few carefully selected
individuals

in depth to arrive at a fuller
understanding of the work practice across all
customers.

Through inquiry and interpretation, it reveals
commonalities across a product’s customer base.

What is contextual inquiry?

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10

~ Beyer & Holtzblatt

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Contextual Inquiry:


When to do it

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Every ideation and design cycle
should start with a
contextual inquiry into the full experience
of a customer
and his/her.

In
AgilexUX
, a regular cadence of lightweight research
constantly cycled back into the scrum team allows for
rapid validation of ideas.

Contextual inquiry clarifies and focuses the problems a
customer is experiencing by discovering the

•
Precise situation in which the problems occur.

•
What the problem entails.

•
How customers go about solving them.

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

What is your focus?

Who is your audience?

Recruit & schedule participants

Learn what your users do

Develop scenarios

Conduct the inquiry

Interpret the results

Evangelize the findings

Rinse, repeat
(at least monthly)



Contextual Inquiry:


How to do it

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12

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Before starting contextual inquiry process, you
should establish rapport with your user since
you
’
ll have to watch him/her working as
“
naturally
”

as possible

Establishing expectations of roles is crucial to
gathering rich, unbiased data.

Inquiry process should be driven by the
participant
’
s work rather than interviewer
’
s
questions

Get to know your user

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13

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Customer
-
Researcher Relationship Types

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14



Master/apprentice

The customer is a master from whom you will

be learning the trade



Partnership

Interviewer partners with customer to extract

details of his/her work



Interviewer/interviewee

Interviewee responds to specific questions asked

by the interviewer (entails hierarchy)



Expert/novice

Customer is an expert in his domain, and shares this

experience with the researcher/novice (entails hierarchy)


Guest

Researcher
’
s comfort is the central focus of the inquiry


(entails hierarchy)

Suggested roles

Roles to avoid

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Inquiry Process:
Introduction & Warm
-
Up

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Set up expectations for the observation



Emphasize your role as an
“
observer
”

and
“
learner
”


Ask general questions about the participant

What is a typical day like for you?

What kinds of tasks do you do regularly?

What are some occasional tasks?

Where does today
’
s task fit in the day?

What are common roadblocks?

(master vs apprentice)

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Research

Process

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

16

Inquiry Process:
Main Observation

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Observe the participants

What are they doing?

What tools are they using?

How are they using the
tools?

Have they developed any work
-
arounds
?


Occasionally ask for the participant to describe
what they are doing, providing any necessary
explanations, clarifications, walk
-
through of
actions.


Take copious notes
. Video record, if possible.

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Inquiry Process:
Follow
-
Up & Wrap
-
Up

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Follow
-
Up

After the main observations, ask the participant any follow
-
up
questions you may have regarding your observation which
his/her memory is still fresh.


Wrap
-
Up

Ask the participant about his/her experience and
perspective on the inquiry process

•
Was anything anxiety provoking?

•
Was there anything you would like to have been done
differently?

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Inquiry Results:
What to collect

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What tools do participants use?

Formal tools? Informal tools? What brands?

Behavior sequences

Order of actions is important to understanding how the participants think
about the task

Methods of organization

How do the participants organize the information they use
? (out of
necessity, convenience, importance?)

What kinds of interactions do participants have?

What are the important parties in the transfer of knowledge? Are they
people? Are they processes? Is the information shared? What is the nature
of the interaction?

Collect Artifacts

Artifacts are the non
-
digital tools people use to help them accomplish the
tasks they
’
re trying to do. (ex: if you are interested in learning how people
schedule their events, photograph their daily calendar)

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

20

Analyzing

the results

“
The output from customer research is
not a neat hierarchy; rather, it is
narratives of successes and breakdowns,
examples of use that entail context, and
messy use artifacts
”


Dave Hendry

3/13/2013

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

20

Research Analysis

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What are people
’
s values?

People are driven by their social and cultural contexts as much as their
rational decision making processes.

What are the mental models people build?

When the operation of a process isn
’
t apparent, people create their own
models of it

What are the tools people use?

It is important to know what tools people use since you are building new
tools to replace the current ones.

What terminology do people use to describe what they do?

Words reveal aspects of people
’
s mental models and thought processes

What methods do people use?

Flow is work is crucial to understanding what people
’
s needs are and
where existing tools are failing them.

What are people
’
s goals?

Understanding why people perform certain actions reveals an underlying
structure of their work that they may not be aware of themselves.

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

3/13/2013

Will Evans | Manager, User Experience
Design

22

Affinity
Diagrams

“
People from different teams engaged in
affinity diagramming is as valuable as tequila
shots and karaoke. Everyone develops a
shared understanding of customer needs,
without the hangover or walk of shame
”


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Will Evans & Yana Kuchirko

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Research Analysis:
Affinity Diagrams

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Creates a hierarchy of all observations, clustering
them into themes.


From the video observations, 50
-
100 singular
observations are written on post
-
its

(observations ranging from tools, sequences, interactions,

work
-
arounds, mental models, etc)


With entire team, notes are categorized by relations
into themes and trends.

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

After analysis

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Immediately socialize all findings

Make sure artifacts, images, video are
included

Present them to the entire product,
development, user experience, and
marketing teams

Get into a rhythm. In
AgileUX
, a constant
stream of insight is better than large
research reports

Will Evans
& Yana Kuchirko

Thanks!



Will Evans

@semanticwill


Yana Kuchirko

@mslogophiliac