Month: February 2021

“You are not the user!”, that is a phrase that most of us wanted to express at some point of one of the projects we participated in (hopefully, there is more than just one) or read about an influential article about the value of UX research, or in any UX-related subject. As UX professionals, we hope to begin any project with a discovery phase and incorporate quantitative or qualitative research to understand user needs, challenges and desires. Of course, all projects have limitations that may affect our timelines and budgets this way or another. These limitations not just apply to the beginning, but to the process of the project itself. Eventually, these constraints may affect our needs of inquiry in decision-making processes such as ideation and solution generation for building products with better user experiences. One of the best ways to mitigate effects and risks against understanding the real user experience is to approach UX research with a different angle, and strategically integrate it into the design process. Notably, discovery and ideation are the best stages in a project timeline. There are multiple methods and techniques to include user research, but for a kick-start, let me present you some ideas on how to acknowledge business goals, get onboard with stakeholders about the value of empathizing with users, investigate assumptions, and test user experience preventing conflict of interest among parties.

Begin with stakeholder interviews to identify business objectives

Stakeholder interviews allow you to ask about long and short-term goals, define the success criteria in terms of business, and boil down all these to UX vision and goals. Collecting insights about the business objectives enable you to empathize with different stakeholders and identify risks and opportunities. So, stakeholder interviews will ensure that your project has a clear start with a certain vision and predefined goals that every participant of the project has agreed on which will also assist you to incorporate key stakeholders into the design process.

Stakeholder interviews should be focused on the project scope. Therefore, you should carefully choose your key interview participants according to their influence on the success of your project. Those stakeholders having control over the budget of the project or sponsoring it in that organization are critical to talk to before giving a start to any project. At the end of the stakeholder interviews you should expect to understand capabilities and limitations of the organization, uncover critical roles, skills and experience and align all with business objectives.

Key stakeholders have limited time for a dedicated interview, so be prepared with your interview goals and questions designed especially to point out these objectives. Face-to-face interaction is the best way to communicate your purpose. Besides, you can observe your interviewee enriching the insights you collect even if due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions you have to run it remotely using an online communication tool such as Google Meet or Zoom. Each session should take no more than an hour and less than thirty minutes, ideally. To find the available slot, it would be better if these meetings are scheduled one or two weeks before the session. Since stakeholder interviews are designed to inform and align project participants with the main goals and facilitate focus on success, it is important to inform them about the results of in-depth analysis in a proper template either in a report or presentation.

Use triangulation method to demonstrate the value of empathizing with users

Qualitative research methods are best suited for inquiry of in-depth inquiry of user behaviors. Qualitative data offer a deeper understanding about the meaning behind user actions which leads us to user needs, challenges and desires. In addition, these kinds of research often require bigger budgets than e.g. surveys as in time and effort. Typically organizations that rely on quantitative findings in their decision-making processes have doubts about the validity of qualitative data. At that point “triangulation method” is just what you need.  

The thing with triangulation is that you look for specific qualitative insights that are consistent with the data you collected via quantitative methods or vice versa. For example, if you are using one-on-one interviews to understand the pain points users have on an online shopping website and discover some patterns, you can also design and launch a quick and short poll about the volume of users having similar pain points. Thereby, you can present your valuable qualitative data linking to the percentage of your potential audience. Even if it’s not the purpose of your research, it is sometimes the best way to communicate about the importance of your findings to dig further with follow-up research and to make your arguments stronger in terms of your quantitative-mindset colleagues or stakeholders.

Investigate assumptions to reconcile different opinions

To have proactive user research at the very beginning of a project is invaluable, however there is never enough time, budget or managerial support to initiate with proper research. What I mean by proper research is that developing a deep understanding about user needs to make design decisions easier, thereby hindering personal judgements and assumptions about what users want or have difficulties with. Making quick decisions based on assumptions – in the name of agile (yes, we all have been through this) – that are not validated with data would only seem to be doing it the right way. In fact, neither stakeholders nor designers are the real users and heuristics are not enough to lead design decisions at some point.

For creating ideal solutions for users, uncovering the problems that mostly affect the experience is the key. Therefore, you should bring your UX research skills onto the table to test the assumptions ahead.  With proper UX research methods, you can test all the ideas generated in ideation and ground the most usable options to user data. Let me give you an example of a case. If you are a researcher in an e-commerce project about a category that users are not familiar with, you could offer a card sorting test to build an understanding of their mind maps and present your findings to your team and stakeholders to make better decisions about site navigation. Before taking such an initiative, you should be careful not to apply the wrong method, facilitating a biased study, or simply asking the wrong questions to the wrong people. Let’s say you should be precise about the basics of UX research design. 

Test your design decisions eliminating conflict of interest between teams

Definition of done is a critical notion either in a feature release or a redesign project. If your team or just the development team is working agile, then the notion becomes more important and affects all of your research. That is because UX and agile have different understandings when it comes to definition of done. For agile delivering a working software means that the task is completed, whereas for UX testing the interaction with real users is a must before it actually means  “working” whether with a working prototype or a manually crafted model. When we put time, budget and support issues that we have discussed above into the equation, as you can see these two definitions become conflicting. 

Here is the tip to overcome this challenge; prioritize the most questionable patterns in the design decisions principally with your UX team and development team and test those patterns with users. Depending on your timeline and budget you can run usability tests moderated or unmoderated, focusing on your personas or just guerilla sampling. However, you should be able to rationalize your reasons to include or exclude personas in concern of the validity and reliability of your study. At the end of your research be prepared to deliver your findings to design and development teams with spotting areas of improvement. 

The potential of UX research strategy

The potential of research methods is almost unlimited. You can either conduct one-on-one interviews or launch online surveys depending on your research questions responding to the needs of the project. Although there are some constraints such as time, budget, or support against UX research, the benefits strongly outweigh them. With all this in mind, you can show those benefits while strategically integrating research into the design process. You can use other techniques to align with stakeholders and business goals, denoting the value of user interviews as a data collection method and running quick tests for both investigating assumptions and preventing a conflict of interest among parties.

“Designing search” doesn’t sound like a big deal for one who hasn’t given deep thought to the task: “You just type stuff into a box, and it shows you results!”, right? Not that simple. It is actually a big deal and  way more of a complex task than it sounds or looks, but fortunately, it’s a fun piece to design. 

As Baymard Institute highlights; “it’s important to recognize that returning a handful of highly relevant matches to the user’s search query isn’t enough.” 

So how does one design a proper search system that meets users’ expectations, and offer a smooth experience?

Ace the basics

Generally, a search box simply consists of three elements; an input field, a button, and an icon. Although it has such basic elements, its impact may be huge. As NNgroup highlights in their article; “the usability of the search on intranets accounted for 43% of the difference in employee productivity between intranets with high and low usability.” 

As simple as it may sound, a search should be in the form of a box. That is to say, we should avoid just using an icon, or a link if we have available space because our mental models are already used to looking for a box we can type in when it comes to searching stuff, which is usually placed on the top of the screen. We are also used to seeing a search icon (the magnifying glass) that sits inside the search box, which purposefully makes a search bar more recognizable and easier to find for the users. Avoiding an icon-only search approach also prevents the users from waiting for a search field to appear and look for where to type in the search query; thus decreasing the cost of interaction.

OK we got the basics, but how do we design a system that provides users relevant information that matches with their search queries? Think about companies that have thousands of products to choose from, like Amazon, Walmart, or Ebay. Say the user just types a simple, single word: “turtle”. What does she mean, really? Turtle tank accessories? Turtleneck sweater? Ninja turtles? What if she misspells the word? Or what if there are no results, what then?

So let’s get into some details to discover how we can design better search systems in order to enhance the user experience.

Search results

The logic you’ll design for the search results will mostly determine the quality of your search system. But even if you do your best, users are not going to just type in a perfectly written product name as in your inventory or well-thought-out title because most users are very poor at query reformulation.

What’s more, especially in e-commerce, users are in their purchase-decision process where they haven’t decided on, or simply don’t know what they’re looking for yet. This adds extra significance to organizing search results and presenting relevant items. In the “turtle” example we’ve given above, it’d be a good start to label a few most searched items according to their categories, and move onto the less-likely ones:

“turtle tank accessories — in pet supplies
“ninja turtles” — in toys
“turtleneck” — in clothing
turtle night lamp
turtle gifts
turtle sweatshirt
…

For a side-note, if we know that the user has searched for, say a clothing item before, we can make a decision to prioritize the “turtleneck sweater” in the search result hierarchy to increase the usability.

Predictive search

Google defines search predictions as “possible search terms related to what you’re looking for and what other people have already searched for.” And one of the key aspects of developing a well-designed search system is to consider the auto-complete suggestions. We now know that if users don’t get good results on their first try, later search attempts rarely succeed, so it’s vital to help and guide the user for a better search experience. It is also especially useful for people using mobile devices, making it easy to complete a search on a small screen where typing can be difficult. We should make sure that the search suggests relevant and guiding, and even minor typo mistakes are covered.

As Baymard Institute shared about the autocomplete-design in their blog;

“During usability testing, autocomplete suggestions were often observed to slow down users in typing and selecting their search query. However, spending a few seconds extra to construct an accurate and detailed search query — through the help of the autocomplete — saves users several wasted minutes on the otherwise often overly broad search queries they tend to submit on sites that don’t have search autocomplete.”

Here are 13 important and actionable tips from the same article:

• Keep the list manageable (mobile & desktop) 
• Style auxiliary data differently (mobile & desktop) 
• Highlight the differences, not what users just typed (mobile & desktop)
• Avoid scrollbars (desktop specific) 
• Reduce visual noise within autocomplete (desktop specific) 
• Labels foster scannability (desktop specific) 
• Highlight the active suggestion (desktop specific) 
• Provide visual depth (desktop specific) 
• Reduce visual competition from external elements (mobile-specific) 
• Style autocomplete suggestions for readability (mobile-specific) 
• Use text wrapping for suggestions (mobile-specific) 
• Provide visual hints that autocomplete is scrollable (mobile-specific) 
• Enable easy removal of queries (mobile-specific)

No results

If the user types a search query that has no corresponding result and comes to a dead-end, it’s not enough to say that “no results found.” To provide a good user experience, it’s important to inform the user about alternative options, or the next steps she may take. To prevent the users from leaving your digital product, you can suggest categories that the user may want to try out, which should also be based on the user’s search query. 

For instance, if there’s no result for “purple summer shirts” because there are no purple products, a link to a product list of “shirts” with the “summer” filter pre-applied may be suggested for the users.

Accessibility

There is a huge segment of people that designers may disregard when crafting an experience: People with disabilities —one of the largest user groups in the world. According to a fact-sheet released by the World Health Organization (WHO), there are over 1 billion —about 15% of the world’s population— have some form of disability. When designing a search system, it is important to take accessibility into account from the very beginning. As the web accessibility guidelines of Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh puts it, “search bars can be a way for users of assistive technology to quickly find answers without tabbing through the navigation or reading all the content of a web page.”

• A search bar should be set up in the form of paired label and input.
• Using a submit button to search decreases the number of keystrokes necessary to use the form. 
• Always include the word ‘search’ in the label somewhere (you can visually hide it, though) and in the submit button.
• Always include an ARIA* role=’search’ somewhere on the form or fieldset. 

*ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is a set of attributes that define ways to make web content and web applications (especially those developed with JavaScript) more accessible to people with disabilities.

More questions to answer

There are a lot more aspects to consider when designing search systems; from deciding on “how many characters should we wait for the user to type in order to start showing the results”, to “how many results to show on mobile devices to avoid scroll bars”. Though every problem needs a unique solution, I hope these will give a brief overview of what to keep in mind.