In my ongoing effort to get more familiar with user experience and interactive design, I recently listened to a podcast by Boagworld. As a side note, Boagworld is one of my regular, highly recommended, podcasts that I listen too. I have listened to every podcast since episode 1, and now they are on 150. In this podcast, Paul Boag, who is the host, interviews Liz Danzico about User Research.
Liz is a user experience consultant in New York City. She has been developing web sites and user experiences online for about 12 years. She works with Happy Cog Studios with Jeffrey Zeldman and Jason Santa Maria.
Liz gives some very insiteful information on user experience and user research. I’m sure those already in this field know all of this, but for me it was some great information.
Some of the points she brings up are:
There are no real rules about what [user research] includes and what it doesn’t. You can basically speculate about what your users want, or you can find [what they] know?
She brings up four methods you can use in gathering research.
- Testing in a lab
- Testing in the users home or offic (natural environment)
- Creating personas
- Analytics software
I would say that, usability testing in a lab, using personas and scenarios, and ethnography or going out into the field and watching users, whether they’re in their homes or their offices, are the three kind of key ways to gather user research with users. The fourth way that I’ll mention is not with users directly, but it is certainly user research that’s available more and more now, and that is data on sort of analytics, which you can gather from Google Analytics, Shaun Inman’s Mint, these kinds of things. Watching site data and user behavior through site analytics is another form of user research that gives you some information, and you can watch these traffic patterns on your site. It doesn’t answer the question “Why?” but it does show you some evidence as to how users are behaving on your site.
Subscribe to the podcast here (link to iTunes).
