USER RESEARCH: QUALITATIVE

RESEARCH, USER CENTERED

APPROACH, ETHNOGRAPHY &
INTERVIEWS
GROUP MEMBERS:
Aqsa Akram (101621006)
Sheeza Batool (101621055)
Sidra Shahid (101621057)
Rabia Hussain (101621040)
Iqra Khalil (101621016)
Zunaira Younis(101621065)
Laraib(101621024)
User Research
■ User research focuses on understanding user behaviors, needs, and
motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other
feedback methodologies. 
■ There is a long, comprehensive list of UX research methods employed
by user researches, but at its center is the user and how they think
and behave —their needs and motivations.
■ There are two main types of user research:
■ Quantitative (statistics: can be calculated and computed; focuses on
numbers and mathematical calculations) and Qualitative (insights:
concerned with descriptions, which can be observed but cannot be
computed).
Cont.

■ Quantitative research can only

answer questions about how
much or how many along a few
reductive axes. Qualitative
research can tell you about
what, how and why in rich,
multivariate detail.
The value of Qualitative
Research
■ With Qualitative Research, the emphasis is not on measuring and
producing numbers, but instead on understanding the qualities of a
particular technology and how people use it in their lives, how they
think about it and how they feel about it.
■ Qualitative research helps us understand the domain, context and
constraints of a product in different, more useful ways than
quantitative research do.
■ It also quickly helps us identify patterns of behavior among users and
potential users of a product much more quickly and easily than would
be possible with quantitative approaches.
Types of Qualitative Research

■ Stakeholder interviews
■ Subject matter expert (SME) interviews
■ User and customer interviews
■ User observation/ethnographic field studies
■ Literature review
■ Product/prototype and competitive audits
Stakeholder interviews
Stakeholders are any key members of the organization commissioning the
design work,
and typically include managers and key contributors from engineering, sales,
product
marketing, marketing communications, customer support, and usability.
• What is the preliminary vision of the product from each stakeholder
perspective?
• What is the budget and schedule?
Subject
• What areMatter Expert perceptions
the stakeholders’ (SME) of the user?, etc.
interviews
Some stakeholders may also be subject matter experts (SMEs): experts
on the domain
within which the product you are designing will operate. Most SMEs were
users of the
product or its predecessors at one time, and may now be trainers,
managers, or
consultants. Some points to consider about using SMEs are:
• SMEs are expert users.
• SMEs are knowledgeable, but they aren’t designers.
• SMEs are necessary in complex or specialized domains such as
User and customer interviews
Customers of a product are those people who make the decision to purchase it.
Users of a product should be the main focus of the design effort. They are the
people
(not their managers or support team) who are personally trying to accomplish
something with the product.
When interviewing customers, you will want to understand:
• Their goals in purchasing the product.
• Their frustrations with current solutions.
• Their decision process for purchasing a product of the type you’re designing,
etc.

Information we are interested in learning from users includes:

• Problems and frustrations with the product (or analogous system if they are
potential users)
• The context of how the product fits into their lives or workflow: when, why,
and how the product is used, that is, patterns of user behavior with the
product.
• Domain knowledge from a user perspective: what do users need to know to
accomplish their jobs.
User observation/ethnographic field studies

The most effective technique for gathering qualitative user data combines
interviews and observation, allowing the designer to ask clarifying questions
and direct inquiries about situations and behaviors they observe in real-time.

Literature review

In parallel with stakeholder interviews, the design team should review any
literature pertaining to the product or its domain. This can and should include
product marketing plans, market research, technology specifications and white
papers, business and technical journal articles in the domain, competitive
studies.

Product/prototype and competitive audits

Also in parallel to stakeholder and SME interviews, it is often quite helpful for
the design team to examine any existing version or prototype of the product, as
well as its chief competitors.
Some other Types of Qualitative Research:

Case Studies:
Case studies are the most common kind of qualitative method. It is a attempt to
shed light on phenomena. The case can be an individual person, an event, a
group or an institution.

Grounded Theory:
Theory is developed inductively from a corpus of data acquired by a participant-
observer.

Phenomenology:
Describes the structures of experience as they present themselves to
consciousness, without recourse to theory, deduction are assumptions from other
disciplines.
Methods of Collecting
Qualitative data
 Direct interaction with individuals
• One to one interaction
• Or Interaction with a group
 Interviews
 Focus Group Discussion
 Observation
User-Centered Approach

■ User-Centered Approach or User-

Centered Design (UCD) is an iterative
design process in which designers and
other stakeholders focus on the users
and their needs in each phase of the
design process.
■ UCD calls for involving users
throughout the design process via a
variety of research and design
techniques so as to create highly usable
and accessible products for them.
Ethnography

■ The term Ethnography means “portrait of people”.

■ Ethnography is a qualitative orientation to research that emphasizes the
detailed observation of people in naturally occurring settings.
■ There are different ways in which this method can be associated with design.
Beynon-Davies has suggested that ethnography can be associated with the
development as: "ethnography of”, “ethnography for”, and
“ethnography within.”
■ Characteristics:
• Contextual
• Unobtrusive
• Longitudinal, etc.
Ethnography Framework

■ Ethnography Framework has three dimensions

• Distributed co-ordination
• Plans and procedures
• Awareness of work
■ Distributed co-ordination:
The distributed co-ordination dimension focuses on the distributed nature
of the tasks and activities, and the means and mechanisms by which they
are coordinated. This has implications for the kind of automated support
required.
Cont.

■ Plans and procedures:

The plans and procedures dimension focuses on the organizational
support for the work, such as workflow models and organizational
charts, and how these are used to support the work.
■ Awareness of work:
The awareness of work dimension focuses on how people keep
themselves aware of others’ work. No one works in isolation, and it
has been shown that being aware of others’ actions and work
activities can be a crucial element of doing a good job.
Following are the methods to allow the designers to work like ethnographers
themselves:
• Coherence
• Contextual Design

 Coherence:

The coherence method combines experiences of using ethnography to inform

design with
developments in requirements engineering. Specifically, it is intended to
integrate social
analysis with object-oriented analysis from software engineering.

Coherence builds upon the framework introduced above and provides a set of
focus
questions for each of the three dimensions, here called “viewpoints”.
In addition to viewpoints, Coherence has a set of concerns and associated
questions.

 Contextual Design:
Contextual design has seven parts:
• Contextual inquiry
• Work modeling, consolidation
• Work redesign
• User environment design
• Mockup
• Test with customers
• Putting it into practice

Contextual inquiry forms a solid theoretical foundation for quantitative

research, but as a
specific method it has some limitations and inefficiencies.
Following methods help in improvement of this method:
• Shortening the interview process
• Using smaller design teams
• Identifying goals first
• Looking beyond business contexts
Preparing for Ethnographic
Interviews
■ Ethnographic Interviewing is a type of qualitative research that
combines immersive observation and directed one–on–one interviews.

■ Identifying candidates:
Because the designer must capture an entire range of user behaviors
regarding a product, it is critical that the designers identify and
appropriately diverse sample of users and user types when planning
a series of interviews.
Based on information gleaned form stakeholders, SMEs, and
literature reviews, designers need to create a hypothesis that serves
as a starting point I determining what sorts of users and potential
users to interview.
Cont.

■ The personal hypothesis:

The persona hypothesis is a first cut at defining the different kinds of
users (and
sometimes customers) for a product in a particular domain.
■ The persona hypothesis attempts to address, at a high level, these
three questions:
• What different sorts of people might use this product?
• How might their needs and behaviors vary?
• What ranges of behavior and types of environments need to be
explored?
Cont.

■ Role in business and customer domains:

Patterns of needs and behavior, and therefore types of users, vary
significantly between business and technical, and consumer products.

■ Behavioral and demographic variables:

Beyond roles, a persona hypothesis seeks to identify variables that might
distinguish users based on their needs and behaviors.

Another helpful approach in building a persona hypothesis is making use of

demographic variables. When planning your interviews, you can use
market research to identify ages, locations, gender, and incomes of the
target markets for the product.
Cont.

■ Domain expertise versus technical expertise:

Different users will have varying amount of technical expertise; similarly,
some users of a product may be less expert in their knowledge of the
product’s domain (for example, accounting knowledge in the case of a
general ledger application).
Thus, depending on who the design target of the product is, domain support
may be a necessary part of the product’s design, as well as technical ease
of use.
■ Environmental variables:
A final consideration, especially in the case of business products, is the
cultural differences between organizations in which the users are employed.
Putting a plan together

■ After you have created a persona hypothesis, complete with potential

roles, behavioral, demographic, and environmental variables, you
then need to create an interview plan that can be communicated to
the person in charge of providing access to users.
■ Each identified role, behavioral variable, demographic variable, and
environmental variable identified in the persona hypothesis should be
explored in four to six interviews (some time more if a domain is
particular complex).
How to conduct ethnographic
interviews
Securing interviews:
Use the followings to get access
• Stakeholders
• Market or usability research firm
• Friends and relatives
Interview teams and timings
2 interviewees, 1-hr per interview, 6 per day

Phases of ethnographic interviews

Begin -> End
Structural issues -> Specific issues
Goal-oriented issues -> Task-oriented issues
Cont.
Early-phase
• Exploratory
• Focused on domain knowledge
• Open-ended questions

Mid-phase
• Identify patterns of use
• Clarifying questions
• More focused questions

Late-phase
• Confirm patterns of use
• Clarify user roles and behaviors
• Closed-ended questions
Cont.

Basic Interview Methods Basic Interview

Questions
• Interview where the action happens • Goal-oriented questions
• Avoid a fixed set of questions • System-oriented
• Focus on goals first, tasks second questions
• Avoid making the user a designer • Workflow-oriented
• Avoid discussions of technology question
• Encouraging storytelling • Attitude-oriented
• Ask for a show-and-tell questions
• Avoid leading questions
Any
Question?
Reference

■ Human Computer Interaction(course textbook)

■ https://www.toptal.com/designers/user-research/guide-to-ux-research-
methods
■ https://www.slideshare.net/abhimanyunusrl/qualitative-research-2796
5596