You don’t need a big budget, weeks of time or special labs to get user insights quickly and inexpensively. We’ll discuss how you can meet your goals, improve your products and make informed decisions through user research. Usability testing (remote & in-person), interviews, surveys and analytics are a few methods we’ll review, particularly in the context of your own business challenges and user questions.

1. user research
fast & cheap
John Douglass
Photo: ahearnecyclespdx.blogspot.com

2. Google+

3. Agenda
METHODS
Measuring Success
Why User Research?
6 Fast & Cheap Methods
Applications
Questions
INTRO
IMPLEMENTATION

5. How do you measure the success
of your sites and apps?

6. How can user research help?
Images: 123RF.com | amadarose.co.uk

7. A process to study behavior

8. Why is it important?

9. Pain Squad: keeping sick kids focused
Image: aiga.com

11. 90% compliance rate (unheard of!)
Higher quality reports
Scaling internationally
Image: aiga.com

12. Amazon’s $300 million button

14. # of customers went up by 45%
extra $15 million the first month
$300 million by end of year

15. Quantitative - how many or how much
Flickr: Anirudh Koul

16. Qualitative - why or how to fix a problem

17. All this sounds expensive
and time-consuming.

20. Hidden Gems
Stuart Chalmers, flickr

21. Hidden Gems
Dig up user insights floating around the organization.
Go hunting for
* Search logs / analytics
* Dept or agency reports - marketing, PR, comms
* CRM application data (Salesforce)
* Logs from call center
* Information surrogates - volunteers, fundraisers
Ask others
* What’s surprising to you? What do our users want?

22. Hidden Gems
Benefits
* Little preparation needed
* Makes allies, gets you closer to stakeholders
Pro Tips
* Set time limits for each source, break up reviews
* Put findings on stickies, organize into groups over
time

23. Heuristics Reviews
Flickr: Official U.S. Air Force

24. Heuristics Reviews
Ensure optimal usability by assessing against a
predefined set of guidelines.
Method
* Determine your scope: entire app, forms, content, etc.
* Choose a set of guidelines. Ex: http://goo.gl/GmAUi
* Document applicable guidelines and whether your
product conforms
* Use “yes/no” or scales of severity (1-5)

25. Heuristics Reviews
Benefits
Can conduct quickly: from a few hours to 1-2 days tops.
Pro Tips
* Have a colleague conduct a separate review. Compare
and discuss.
* Conduct the review (or a part of it) in front of key
stakeholders.
* Focus on “top 5” list and assign to responsible parties.

26. Cognitive Walkthroughs
Flickr: seantoyer

27. Cognitive Walkthroughs
Group inspection to discover how easy it is for new
users to accomplish tasks with the system
Method
(1) Scope a task - donation flow, sign-up, searching, etc.
(2) Write down the “happy path”
(3) Recruit 2-4 colleagues not on the web team. New
employees, volunteers, support staff work well.
(4) Schedule 1-hour session w/ colleague participants
and key stakeholders (designer, developer and/or PM)
as observers .
(5) Ask stakeholders to look out for 2 things...

28. Cognitive Walkthroughs
* Do participants know what to do at this step?
* If the participants do the right thing, do they know that
they did the right thing, and are making progress
towards their goal?

29. Cognitive Walkthroughs
Benefits
Can conduct at any stage of development: wireframes
or design mocks work well.
Pro Tips
* Keep the scope manageable, no more than 1-2 tasks.
* Hold pre-briefing for stakeholder observers to deflect
design defensiveness, establish leadership of
moderator.
* Brief after the session on what people took away.
* Focus on top 5 issues

30. Lightning Surveys
Flickr: Thomas Hawk

32. Lightning Surveys
Use Google Consumer Surveys to find preferences,
opinions, behavior and beliefs.
Method
(1) Scope question(s): “which logo is better?”, “how many
people have heard of our product?”, “which services are
most important to our key demographic?”
(2) Scope an audience: general US population, doctors
only, people who are familiar with your product, etc.
(3) Write questions following best practices, see
goo.gl/ohPHY

34. Lightning Surveys
Benefits
* Can take as little as 10 minutes to deploy. Days to get
results.
* Awesome graphs and data manipulation.
* Statistically accurate.
Pro Tips
* Field questions with key stakeholders before the test
for buy-in.
* Print graphs and put around the office to socialize
findings.

35. Remote Recruiting
Flickr: A.Davey

36. Remote Recruiting
Intercept users of your site or immediately respond to
mentions on social media. All in real time. Create a
participant database.
Method
(1) Determine the type of user you’d like to target. Write
questions to screen out broader audiences.
(2) Use Ethn.io to add screener to your site or you can
send out a link via email, social channels.
(3) Use your database of users for whatever you want:
live remote interviews, surveys, in-person testing, etc.

37. Remote Recruiting
Benefits
* MUCH cheaper than recruiting agencies. Can use
database for other methods: interviews, testing, etc.
* Recruit people who are real users of your sites/apps,
not just those who say they are.
Pro Tips
* Check with your legal dept to clear compensation and
non-disclosure documents, when you interview/test.
* Read the book Remote Research (Bolt, Tulathimutte)
goo.gl/uIvxe. Good guides/scripts and tech advice.

38. Unmoderated Testing
Flickr: Ed Yourdon

40. Unmoderated Testing
Have users complete tasks and answer questions on
your site or on competitors. Recommend Loop11.com.
Method
(1) Determine which tasks / sections your team wants
usability feedback on.
(2) Write 5-10 task scenarios that have users attempting
realistic tasks in which they interact with the parts of the
application you want to test.
(3) Send link to recruits (from Ethnio, other databases).
(4) Launch project and analyze results.

42. Unmoderated Testing - Loop11
Benefits
* Support available throughout the process.
* Available for iPad and iPhone.
* Can run a test on ANY website. No code to embed.
* Pricing for non-profits ~$158 / month or 1-time use
$350.
Pro Tips
* Setup monthly benchmarking to evaluate changes
over time. Let it run on “auto-pilot”, analyze for a few
hours each month.

43. Hidden Gems - uncovering insights in own org
Heuristics Reviews - expert review using guidelines
Cognitive Walkthrough - group review by task
Lightening Surveys - consumer surveys in minutes
Remote Recruiting - Ethnio to recruit a database
Unmoderated Testing - Loop11 for testing tasks

44. Be Inclusive
Dump Brains
Stay Childlike
Use Snack Sizes
Principles to get most from methods

45. It’s Our Research
(Sharon)
Going Deeper
Remote Research
(Bolt, Tulathimutte)
Observing the
User Experience
(Goodman et. al.)
More remote research tools: http://remoteresear.ch/tools/

46. Questions?
Thank you! Get at me...
John Douglass
Google+ http://goo.gl/DwvXH
Twitter @JDouglass