Kathy Baxter

Extreme usability: adapting research approaches for agile development

Agile development is being adopted by many leading software companies, such as those represented by this panel. Though many instructional resources exist to guide companies through a change to Agile Development, there are few resources available on the subject of Agile development and User Centered Design (UCD). As a result, user experience practitioners have had to develop their own tactics and strategies for maintaining sound UCD practices within their organizations when moving to Agile. This panel consists of six practitioners who actively work with development teams using Agile. Panel members will share the challenges and successes they face while championing UCD within their respective development organizations. Panelists will focus on adaptations to research methodology and strategy that make UCD possible to attain within Agile cultures.

During Your User Research Activity

In this chapter, we cover the fundamentals of executing a successful user research activity. Because user research activities can occur in the lab or in the field, in person, or via e-mail, audio chat, or video chat, how much you, as the researcher, have to do “during” an activity can differ greatly depending on which activity you have chosen. We discuss who should be invited to observe user research activities and how you should prepare them to be good observers; how to welcome participants, warm-up strategies; how and when to provide incentives and how to develop rapport; and how to moderate your activity, use a think-aloud protocol, and debrief participants. We then describe strategies on how to record a session and provide tips for good notetaking. We conclude the chapter with recommendations for how to deal with awkward situations that may come up during the activity such as when a participant arrives late to a session.

Before You Choose an Activity: Learning About Your Product Users

When starting work on a new project, your first objectives are to learn about the product (if it already exists), domain, and (target) users. It is key for you to ascertain as much as possible about any existing products and domain in terms of functionality, competitors, and customers, so you do not duplicate work or spend time generating knowledge that already exists. This is done via using your product yourself, customer support comments, social sentiment analysis, log files and web analytics, speaking with your marketing department, competitive analysis, and getting feedback from early adopters or partners (e.g., trusted testers). In addition, you need to assess what is currently understood about the users and begin to create user profiles. This information will enable you to choose appropriate user research activities so that you can ultimately improve your product. In this chapter, we detail how to collect product information from a variety of sources and how to make sense of the information readily available to you. We will also discuss how to create user profiles, personas, scenarios, guiding principles, and antiprinciples and how to use these as design tools so that you can maximize the impact of your research. Finally, we discuss special user types that you should keep in mind when designing your product: international users, challenged users, children, and older adults.

Introduction to User Experience

User experience is the field concerned with improving people’s interactions with technology. It encompasses everything from generating user requirements to visual design. User requirements refer to the features/attributes a product, service, or design should have or how it should perform from the users’ perspective. User-centered design is an approach for collecting and analyzing these requirements. This chapter introduces the basic concepts behind user-centered design, introduces stakeholders and their requirements, teaches you how to prevent resistance from stakeholders, introduces you to the kinds of arguments you may encounter, and provides suggestions for strategies to deal with them.

Preparing for Your User Research Activity

Once you have completed all the research you can before involving your end users and you have identified the user requirements activity necessary to answer your open questions, you need to prepare to plan and execute your activity. These steps are critical to ensuring that you collect the best data possible from the real users of your product. We cover everything that happens or that you should be aware of prior to collecting your data, including sample size and creating a proposal, recruiting your participants, and piloting your activity.

Choosing a User Experience Research Activity

Now that you have gotten stakeholder buy-in, learned about your products and users, considered legal and ethical considerations, and arranged any facilities you may need, you are ready to choose the user experience research method that is best suited to answer your research question. In this chapter, we walk you through what it takes to do research well including how to get the right people involved, how to ask the right questions, and how to make sure that you know the limits of your project. With those things in mind, we teach you how to choose the right user research method for your research question. This chapter concludes by providing an overview of the methods presented in this book and a decision aid for choosing which methods will work best in situations you will encounter.

Setting Up Research Facilities

Now that you have decided to pursue user experience research, you may be wondering whether a permanent space needs to be built to conduct these activities. The answer is no. It is great if you have the budget, but it is not absolutely necessary. If you want to observe users in their own environment (e.g., field studies) or collect data from a lot of users (e.g., surveys, diary studies), then a usability lab is unnecessary. However, labs are excellent for card sorting, interviews, and focus groups. In this chapter, we discuss the options for setting up facilities to conduct user research. We look at the pros and cons for each option, as well as what you should be aware of when making your selection.

Chapter 9 – Interviews

Interviews are one of the most frequently used user research techniques. In the broadest sense, an interview is a guided conversation in which one person seeks information from another. There are a variety of different types of interviews you can conduct ranging from structured to unstructured depending on your constraints and needs. Interviews are incredibly flexible and can be conducted as a solo activity or in conjunction with another user experience activity (e.g., following a card sort). The end result of a set of interviews is an integration of perspectives from multiple users. If you conduct interviews with multiple user types of the same process/system/organization, you can obtain a holistic view. Finally, interviews can be used to guide additional user research activities.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

Abstract Before conducting any kind of user activity there are a number of ethical and legal considerations that you must be aware of. You are responsible for protecting the participants, your company, and the data you collect. These are not responsibilities that should be taken lightly. This chapter applies to all readers. Even if you are doing “just a little research,” if it involves human participants, this chapter applies to you. In this chapter, we will inform you of what you need to know before conducting a user activity to make sure you collect valuable data without legal or ethical harm. These are general guidelines but you also need to be aware of your local laws, practices, and regulations.

UX management: current and future trends

User Experience (UX) leaders and managers are required to continually adapt to changes in: organizational strategies and re-structuring, resources, technology, economic pressures, and other factors. Simultaneously, more companies are realizing that they need UX expertise to ensure that they are competitive in todays marketplace. This panel is comprised of UX leaders who have created strategies and tactics to succeed both in spite of and with the aid of the past and current trends. The panel will focus on the current trends, what strategies and tactics have and have not worked in addressing these trends, and also discuss which future trends they think will impact UX departments, companies, and the field, and how they are preparing for these future trends. The panel will be of interest to managers, practitioners and those who work closely with these teams, including developers, project managers, market researchers, test managers, and executives.