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USER-CENTERED RESEARCH
Contextual Design Methods
PROBLEM:
Human-Computer Interaction is the study of how to conceive, build, and analyze systems people use. Building something good takes work and requires a good understanding of the user's needs and workflows. Whether the industry is healthcare, finance, commerce, transportation, information, communication, work or play, it's important to work from data to verify that you are addressing the right problems.
SOLUTION:
Diagnose the situation, determine the time available for research, decide on the right research questions, choose qualitative and quantitative research methods, pursue. Communicate findings by: usability aspect reports, videos, presentations, and/or mock-ups.
User-centered research and evaluation takes place pre-design to inform it and post-design to evaluate it. These are the Analyze and Evaluate portions of the diagram. This information was taught in UCRE, a core class for the Master's in HCI program.
METHODS:
- Heuristic evaluation: conduct a methodical evaluation to identify problems in a product or service.
- Think aloud protocols: understand how people solve problems firsthand.
- Interviews: learn about goals, problems and opinions in the users own words.
- Survey design and analysis: collect data from a large group of potential users to summarize beliefs, user needs, or product judgments.
- Web analytics and log analysis: study metrics to understand how people are using a website or application.
- Experimentation and A/B testing: identify which version of a design works better.
- Competitive analysis: learn the differences among existing products and services from a user's perspective (as opposed to an operational perspective).
- Contextual Design methods (Karen Holtzblatt) - observation, interpretation, affinity diagrams, sequencing, flow models, and visioning: look for emergent themes from contextual inquiries and draw design ideas that are grounded in data.
Still have doubts? Wondering what the big deal is about user-centered design? Read "How to Get Your Coworkers to Care About User Research."