Ux Research & Marketing - an odd couple

UX Research & Marketing An odd couple
WUD Slovenia 2013
Bjoern Stockleben
Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg & University of
Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal

Björn Stockleben
UX Research & Marketing @ WUD Slovenia 2013

Alan Cooper - Bridging the Gap

This does not only look old. This is from About Face 3 (p.18) by Alan Cooper,
the frist edition dates back to 1995.

Björn Stockleben

Today:

Usability Research
User Experience Design
Interaction Design

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User Experience Research
Interface Design
Service Design Thinking

Gap bridged – Problem solved.
Note to self: End presentation here if already talked too much.

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New Problems, but on a higher level
• UX research is filling a gap, not replacing market
research
• Both claim expertise about the user / customer
• Market research produces powerful, as seemingly
evident numbers & statistics, which are read by your
customers, bosses and co-workers.
• Often it is not the market research that causes
hassle for UX researchers and designers, but people
that superficially quote their reports.
• A lot of publicly available market data is actually
rather PR than research.
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Symptoms of UX vs. Market research
Your research gets questioned.
They ask why you do test with just a few users.
They say your research was not representative.
They say your work is fuzzy and inexact
„but the latest report by market-monsterresearch-corp says 70% of our users would like
to …“
• „Our average customer is 62 years old“
•
•
•
•
•

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Your Reaction
• You find yourself in permanent justification of
your work
• You develop a latent aggression against market
research
• After all, UX research can produce some decent
numbers as well, so bring ‘em on …
Well, the good news is: Coexistence is possible,
even meaningful and might lead to productive
collaboration.
Björn Stockleben

Market Research

UX Research

Large samples

Small samples and single users

Focus on quantitative methods

Focus on qualitative methods

Creation of target groups as abstraction
of a group of individuals

Creation of personas as abstraction of
individuals

Focus on what members of target group
have in common

Focus on what members of target group
have in common and where they differ

Inform Marketing

Inform Design

A phenomenon observed with a single
customer will be ignored

Any finding can inspire design,
regardless of occurence

People are customers

People are users

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Episode 1: Rigid
Representativeness!
Just warming myself up. Let‘s see whether I can make a point in 1 slide.

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About Representativeness
• What fails twice will likely fail again. For user research large test
groups in early design stages are inefficient.
• It is not of too much relevance whether a usability problem
affects 20 or 80% of your users. They all are your users.
• The magic number of 30 participants refers to the normal
distribution in statistics. But there is no single attribute that
would allow to predict a particular usability problem for a
particular user.
• (Applied) user experience research wants to know about the
particular problems of a particular design and not whether this
problem can be generalized.
• That said, be sure you cast your test persons out of the
prospective target user group of your product/service.
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Episode 2: Bloated Benchmarks!
In case you wonder: This text is deliberately printed small.

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Your product here

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Critizism of Benchmarking
• It tries to define your service/product as an intersection
of existing services. This is close to a negative
description of your service and eventually you just have
to go for that black hole / white spot in the center.
• Mashing up interaction concepts from different
services does not result in a coherent service.
• It biases your design towards copying features instead
of deriving them from actual user needs.
• While it is always good to have an overview of existing
solutions, benchmarking is not a user research method.

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Episode 3: The Survey Curse
Note to self: End presentation here if already talked too much.

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In Q4/2011 47% of German TV
Viewers used their tablet PC while
watching TV (Nielsen 2012)
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In the UK this number is at 64%

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And in the US already at 69% !!!

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Conclusion
.. if we provide a tablet app for our TV programme
.. 47% of our viewers will use it
.. with a likely growth to 69% within 1-2 years
Well, yes – now I am exaggerating. But it is to make a point, okay?

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Another Reality
.. according to IfD Allensbach only 6,3 Mio Germans
(about 8%) had access to a tablet PC in their
household.
.. RTL‘s 2nd screen service RTL Inside reached 4% of
the audience of Who wants to be a Millionaire?

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Problems with Numbers
• It is very tempting to just mash up single attributes that show
spectacular numbers, ignoring whether the contexts of those
attributes are compatible.
• The early second screen hype was fueled by ignorance of the usage
context behind the phenomenon: It was just asked, whether
people used their tablet, not whether what they did was in any way
related to the running TV programme.
• Statisticians address this by correlation analysis, but this is not
practicable with all dimensions that play a role in user research.
• In general, constant numbers are boring. They either have to
skyrocket or to disappoint expectations spectacularly.
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Statistics Mashup yields
Mashup User

Copyright links

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Upper left

Lower right

Lower left

Upper right

Surveys yield Stereotype Target
Groups
Target Group 1: Elderly Men

Target Group 2: Young Women

Surveys tend to sort by rather coarse criteria, which have a tendency to become
stereotypical. Although, the survey questions usually do not relate to the actual
product/service and its particular usage context.

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Target Group: „People who cannot read“
Test of a subtitling application in HBB-NEXT

Hard-of-Hearing
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Deaf

Could this have been predicted from the pre-test?
Task execution
time in seconds

Technical skill*
*Technical skill was indirectly assessed by „How often do you ask others for assistance in
technical matters regarding iTV and internet?“ from 0=very often to 4=never.
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„The best way to successfully
accomodate a variety of users is to
design for specific types of
individuals with specific needs.“
(Alan Cooper, About Face 3, p.77)

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Personas from User Interviews
Persona A:
Frequent, structured users

Persona B:
Occassional, browsing users

In User Interviews identify what individuals have in common with
regard to the use of the service/product and its context. Generic
criteria, especially demographic info like age or gender are usually
irrelevant.
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Criticism of Surveys

• Surveys can only measure what is previously known.
•
•
•

So they tell you what might be relevant out of the
things you think could be relevant. You won‘t discover
new relevant phenomenons.
Surveys proliferate stereotypes and force answers to
possibly irrelevant questions (i.e. questions the user
has never asked herself).
Temptation to just combine majority attributes to an
ideal user that has no reflection in reality.
Surveys are uninspiring.

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So, what are surveys good for?

• Screen for possible candidates for your qualitative
•
•

research (interviews, tests). Target groups are not your
users, but your users are member your product‘s target
group.
Surveys can be an instrument in market research
preceding the design process and come into play again at
the end of the design phase during pilots and beta testing.
Survey results can point your attention to opportunities
as a starting point for your qualitative research.
(After all, I did not say that second screen was a bad idea in general.)

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Episode 4: Nifty Needs
Just for the record: Although this sounds conciliable, I still mean what I said before.

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Uses & Gratification Research
•

The Uses & Gratification Approach is a research paradigm from
mass media research introduced by Elihu Katz in 1959.

•

It does ask the question „What do people to with media?“ and
assumes that
1) people do conciously choose media to satisfy needs
2) people can talk about those needs and satisfactions gained

•

This approach reflects the assumptions behind the thinking
aloud method and its variations (although we sometimes also
infer implicit needs from the test results).

•

Thus studies following the Uses & Gratification Approach (or in
general studies that ask why rather than what) can deliver useful
insights for user research / user experience design.

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Motivations for subscribing to music services
(UK,2012)

To access an unlimited music collection
To listen to music I already know
To discover new music before I buy it
To use it on my phone
No advertisements
Not to be limited by free music service restrictions
As a complete music experience
To use it when not connected to the internet
To listen to music before it's out for sale
To get access to friends' playlists or share music
To subscribe to playlists
Digital Music Nation 2013 / EMI Insight

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Share of respondents in %
40,00
36,00
35,00
33,00
30,00
24,00
22,00
22,00
20,00
17,00
17,00

Wrong approach to using these numbers

• Take 3 most important needs as design requirements
• Confuse this table for a complete table of requirements
• Combine arbitrary needs as long as they add up to 100%

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A smarter approach

• Compare those needs with the findings from qualitative
•
•
•

research, e.g. user interviews. A coincidence could hint on
relevance.
Use qualitative research to find out how those needs
correlate (i.e. correspond to the same persona).
Use as inspiration for design and address some of those
needs in the first prototypes to see how it resonates in
user tests.
Take into account that not all of those needs can be solved
in interaction design (e.g. „no advertising“).

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Comparison of needs satisfied by TV, Facebook and Twitter.
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How to use this visualization
•

It combines the findings from three different Uses & Gratification
studies for TV, Facebook & Twitter in a useful, but scientifically
inexact way.

(So this is something like a scientific disclaimer in case you wanted to cite that in your thesis. Sorry.)

•

It can be used as an initial guidance on the choice of platform and
functional distribution in social TV services.

•

It may help you to design connected TV services that are functional
complementary to what happens on the screen.

•

It helps you to not design against the formal nature of a platform (or
medium).

The visualization is based on the following studies. Note that the TV study is very old and that the three studies differed quite a lot in
methodology!
Greenberg, Bradley S. "Gratifications of television viewing and their correlates for British children." The uses of mass communications: Current
perspectives on gratifications research (1974): 71-92.
Joinson, Adam N. "Looking at, looking up or keeping up with people?: motives and use of facebook." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on
Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2008.
Johnson, Philip R., and S. Yang. "Uses and gratifications of Twitter: An examination of user motives and satisfaction of Twitter
use." Communication Technology Division of the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in
Boston, MA. 2009.

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AttrakDiff2
(Marc Hassenzahl et al.)

AttrakDiff uses semantic differentials
to assess the user experience of a
product according to 4 categories:
Pragmatic Quality – Clarity of
interaction model, usability
Attractivity – General aesthetic quality
Hedonic Quality (Identity) –
Resonation between self-perception
of user and product
Hedonic Quality (Stimulation) –
Potential for reaching individual
goals as perceived by the user
(missing in the example to the right)
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Convergence with market research

• Standardized tests like AttrakDiff are a good tool to
•
•

communicate the quality of the potential user experience
of the product to the customer or your marketing
department.
AttrakDiff can as well be used to commonly define
evaluation goals for the design with market research
(instead of having the design itself defined by marketing).
Testing with standardized user experience tests makes
usually sense starting from interactive mockups that
convey a look & feel similar to the final product/service.

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Again, but in a Nutshell.
Yes, I know you did take notes and don‘t need me to sum it up for you.
But let‘s assume for a second you didn‘t.

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User research and market research have different perspectives
on the customer/user.
This may lead to conflicts or may be a perfectly
complementary.
Surveys and other market studies can be a great inspiration for
design, but the designs have to be verified with actual users at
some point in the design process.
The closer you come to the final product, the more
convergence there is between market research and user
research methods.
Marketing should agree on evaluation goals with User
Experience Design instead of imposing design guidelines (with
exception of general CD guidelines on Visual Design).
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Additional References
• Alan Cooper: About Face 3
• Marc Hassenzahl: www.attrakdiff.de

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Interdisciplinary Conference on Cross Media

Interaction Design // Journalism // Media Management

20.-22.03.2014

University of Applied Sciences Magdeburg-Stendal
www.crossmedia-konferenz.de

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Thank you!
Questions?
Now or @stockleben

Björn Stockleben

Ux Research & Marketing - an odd couple

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