User Studies Basic principles, methods, and examples

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User Studies Basic principles, methods, and
examples

• 30.10.2001
• Sari Kujala
• Qure Project
• Software Business and Engineering Institute
  (SoberIT)

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Contents

• User studies goal and principles
• User study process methods and templates
• Analysing stakeholders
• Planning
• Studying users
• Analysing and reporting
• Presenting results
• Effort estimations, lessons learned

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User studies

• The goal is to gather USER NEEDS for product
  development
• User need is manifested by the context of use,
  problems, and possibilities
• Context of use means the characteristics of the
  intended users, users' present tasks, tools and
  environment
• Understanding users goals is essential

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Principles of user studies

• Plan the focus and objectives for the visit
• Watch, listen to, and talk with users in their
  own environment
• Treat users as experts
• Take the role of the apprentice. Your task is to
  confess your ignorance and ask stupid questions.

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User studies What to look for?

• Background information
• Users goals and preferences
• Current processes and problems
• Users knowledge, skills, experiences
• Context of using
• Pros and cons of the current tools and processes

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User study process

• Analysing stakeholders
• Planning
• Seeing users
• Analysing and reporting
• Presenting results

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Analysing stakeholders

• Utilising existing documents
• Identifying stakeholders
• Identifying user groups
• Preliminary user description

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Planning (Hackos and Redish, 1998)

• Decide issues and objectives for the study
• Select user study methods
• Plan how data will be analysed and reported
• Choose participating users
• Choose locations where to go
• Form a user study team and decide roles
• Plan how the user visits will be recorded
• Prepare materials for user visits
• Plan a pleminary schedule

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User study methods

• Observing and video-observing
• Interviewing
• Contextual Inquiry
• Artifact walkthrough
• Thinking-aloud method
• Simulations, role-play
• Interactive feature conceptualization

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Selecting user study methods
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Observing

• Users are observed in their own environment
  performing their tasks
• Focus on gathering non-verbal information
  routinised actions, detailed behaviour,
  environment
• Can be time consuming, if not used together with
  other methods

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Interviewing

• Users are interviewed in their own environment
  using their language
• Focus on verbal information user goals, tasks
  and sequences in general level, domain specific
  information
• Predefined interview themes are used flexibly
• Efficient method, but detailed and nonverbal
  information may be lost

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Contextual Inquiry (Holtzblatt and Byer, 1998)

• Interviewing and observing is combined users are
  watched, listen to, and talked with while they
  work in their own environment
• Focus on uncovering detailed work practice and
  context of use

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Artifact walkthrough

• Users are asked for examples of artifacts forms,
  reports, hand-written manuals, notes
• The artifacts can help to understand
• how tasks are done
• what is difficult for users to do or remember
• what kind of information flows there are from
  user to user

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Thinking aloud-method

• Focus on gathering non-verbal information
  skills, selection rules and problem solving,
  beliefs
• Users are asked to tell and show how they use a
  tool

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Simulations

• If it is not possible to disturb users in real
  situations, the use situation can be simulated
• Or you can videorecord the situation and discuss
  with users afterwards

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Interactive feature conceptualization

• During an interview, tools, places, persons are
  written in sticky notes. In the end, user is
  asked to rearrange the notes in categories, the
  over all picture is drawn together with the
  interviewer using arrows etc.
• Focus on visualisation of user information, the
  overall picture, checking the validity of
  interviews

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Analysing and reporting

• User profiles
• Task sequences and hierarchies
• Scenarios
• User needs tables -gt use cases
• Affinity diagrams
• Videoshots and photographs

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Example A user need table
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Example Use Case
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Report contents

• Case summary
• Customer descriptions
• User descriptions
• Context of use descriptions
• User needs tables
• Findings-tables

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Presenting

• Presentations better way in sharing than a report
  alone
• Videoshots and photographs were prefered
• Presentations inspired salesmen to give more
  examples and information

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Number of person hours spent on the user studies
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Lessons learned from the cases

• A small-scale user study pilot has been a good
  way of introducing user needs gathering to
  companies
• Results visible increased innovations and
  customer satisfaction
• Motivating for people and organisation
• Learning by doing
• A multi-disciplinary team work was efficient