Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium UX Boot Camp

#30dayUXchallenge [Day 9]

I hope you were following our challenge but most importantly doing your homework and have your user research plan set. 🙂

We talked about why we need to but we never explained how we can make sure that we pick the right method(s) to start executing it.

Hundreds of resources

Yes we have!

The internet is great for that because we can select from hundreds or different blogs about what is the right method, the expected time you need to do run it, how much money you need to invest, the agencies which help with recruiting and why hiring a professional researcher is the best option to execute the research plan.

Everything is great but the reality is slightly different when we need to convince stakeholders into dedicating time to validating a solution through running a research plan 🙂

We need to be almost magicians to make a plan, learn about methods, match them with our assumptions and just then… carry on our research — and we didn’t even start with the analysis of the insights 😉

Methods, so many methods

Methods are changing from time to time like fashion — wearing outfits from the eighties again… really?

How to find out the right one?

We talked about assumptions already but we need to be very clear that:
“User research comes from an hypotheses we need to validate”

Based on that hypotheses we can select the right method we may use in order to validate said hypotheses.

Which should I pick?

We can move from field studies from customer journey map when we need to see what our target audience is living and doing in a particular scenario. We can follow people’s thoughts with surveys or we can capture them on user testing sessions. We can find out how people may structure a site running a card sorting workshop or we can just try to see what they did in previous similar circumstances and try to gather they stories.

I would use card sorting in order to find out if labels of my page are confusing.

Why stories

Stories are great to see what are the hidden motivations have some particular behaviour. They are also fully detailed narratives which brings us a completely different background to ask the right ‘why’ at the right time.

This video (57 mins) is a good example of how with stories we can collect and uncover the Jobs to Be Done:

<a href="https://medium.com/media/11befffe35bdb39c61a1acd1615967a1/href">https://medium.com/media/11befffe35bdb39c61a1acd1615967a1/href</a>

Collect stories & map them out

From those stories we can identify some identify milestones and they are great to divide the activities.

From the activities we would love to gather feelings, experiences, motivations and some goals.

. Stories never fail.
. Stories are complete and contextual.
. Stories are great to remember!

Share with us how you collect stories

Share your experiences on this topic.
Pass the pen… let’s learn together 🙂

<a href="https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href">https://medium.com/media/8d5e2c740a04faf463af9accfa7e3c31/href</a>Natalia Rey — UX Designer at RedGate, mom of 2 little creatures & illustrator on her spare time

This post is part of the #30dayUXchallenge: you can read more about why we started it here, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter and Instagram!

Stories —executing your user research (part 1) was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stories —executing your user research (part 1)

Cool stuff, every week

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